Name: A Year in London
Director: Flaminia Graziadei
Genre: Romance, Drama
Released: 2026-07-17T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 90 min
Cast: Melanie Liburd, Nina Pons, Matteo Bassi, Karin Giegerich, Carlotta Morelli

Two women stand in a London side street after dark, brick at their backs and a single champagne flute catching the streetlight between them. Neither looks at the other straight on. That guarded, half-lit composition — closeness without contact — is the whole argument of A Year in London, Flaminia Graziadei’s romantic drama about an Italian fashion student and the London mentor she cannot quite reach across.

The film builds its charge out of proximity rather than event. Olivia, a design student loose in the city for the first time, attaches herself to Nina, a polished London designer who runs her studio and her feelings like a locked room. A violent late-night robbery throws the two together and quietly rearranges the distance between them, and from there the picture is less about what happens than about what the women keep declining to say. Graziadei, who grew the feature out of an award-winning short on sexual identity, describes it as “a metaphorical bridge between different languages, cultures and generations.”

The casting sets the temperature. Melanie Liburd, familiar from This Is Us, plays Nina as composure worn like couture. “On the surface, she presents this incredibly polished, fashionable, powerful exterior,” the actress has said, and the film keeps that surface intact almost to the end. Nina Pons, opposite her, plays Olivia as exposed nerve — appetite, uncertainty, the hunger to be seen by the one person trained not to show anything back. The pairing is the film’s real subject: discipline and need circling each other across a workroom where one holds the other’s future.

Graziadei shoots her two cities as competing weathers. London arrives in wet pavement, tunnel neon and the cold glamour of the fashion floor, a place of hard edges and colder light; Rome and the Italian countryside open the frame outward, the camera lifting into drone shots that read landscape as release from the characters’ tightness. The director’s eye is for texture — fabric under work lamps, skin, the sheen of a half-built collection — and she trusts those surfaces to carry the feeling the dialogue keeps back. Francesco Ciccone’s cinematography and a score by Alexander Bălănescu give the restraint a deliberate, worked-over polish.

The clothes themselves do much of the film’s talking. Graziadei treats the studio as a character — bolts of fabric, pinned toiles, the slow ritual of a fitting — and lets the making of a collection stand in for the making of a self. It is a fashion picture genuinely interested in fashion as labour rather than as backdrop, and its steadiest passages simply watch hands at work.

What the film reaches for is a queer love story told almost entirely in deferral. The two women do not cross a physical line until late; the tension is the semester-long wait, desire routed through mentorship, ambition and the etiquette of a workplace where affection would cost something. Around that withholding Graziadei folds her stated preoccupations — sustainability, self-invention, the disorientation of arriving somewhere new and remaking yourself in its image. The fashion setting invites the obvious comparisons, The Devil Wears Prada and Emily in Paris among them; the film wants to be the sadder, slower thing under that gloss.

Whether the restraint plays as tension or simply as absence is where the film is most exposed, and its first British notices have not been gentle. SceneMag admired the cinematography — those drone-lit sweeps of London and the Italian countryside — but dismissed the romance as “representation without emotional weight,” faulting stiff performances and a robbery subplot it said “makes no sense.” A film that stakes everything on unspoken feeling has nowhere to hide when the feeling fails to land, and A Year in London does not fully solve the problem it sets itself: a love story in which almost nothing is permitted to happen until it is nearly over. The premise is braver than the execution has so far proved to be.

Around the leads, the ensemble takes in Matteo Bassi, Karin Giegerich, Carlotta Morelli and Sutara Gayle, with Nando Irene and Ralph Palka filling out the fashion-world orbit. Graziadei directs from a screenplay she wrote with Laura Jane Swain, produced through Orange Pictures, Raindogs and LonRom Film Production with support from Italy’s Ministry of Culture. Shot between Rome and London, it carries itself as exactly what it is — a small Anglo-Italian independent, sent out on a modest release rather than a wide platform.

A Year in London runs 90 minutes. It opened in Italy on 14 April and reaches cinemas across the United Kingdom and Ireland from 17 July, handled there by Strike Media; no United States date has been set. For a first feature carried almost wholly by two performances and a mood, everything rests on whether audiences read its long-held silences as intimacy — or as a film still waiting for something to begin.