Making a graduation film becomes its own kind of reckoning for Julie, who is still sorting out what was real in the relationship that just ended.
What is The Souvenir: Part II about?
The Souvenir: Part II picks up after the end of Julie's relationship with an older, manipulative man who spent much of that time constructing a version of himself that wasn't entirely true. Now enrolled in film school and shooting her graduation project, Julie tries to turn that relationship into art, which means confronting how much of what she believed about him was fact and how much was performance. The film follows her process as a filmmaker as closely as it follows her grief, treating the two as inseparable: every choice she makes about how to shoot her own story is also a choice about how to understand what happened to her. Joanna Hogg directs with an eye for the texture of student filmmaking, the awkward crews and borrowed equipment, alongside the more private work of a young woman rebuilding her sense of what was true.
About the cast
Honor Swinton Byrne carries the film as Julie, working through a role built as much on hesitation and self-doubt as on resolve. Tilda Swinton appears as Julie's mother, and the ensemble around them, including Richard Ayoade, Charlie Heaton, Joe Alwyn and Harris Dickinson, populates the film school world Julie is trying to make sense of her past inside.
Context & significance
The film is a direct continuation of Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir, and it treats its predecessor less as backstory to summarize than as the emotional material Julie is actively reworking through her own filmmaking. That layered structure, a film about making a film about a relationship, gives Part II a self-aware quality without ever undercutting the sincerity of what Julie is trying to process.
Watching The Souvenir: Part II on Ktime
The Souvenir: Part II is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Farsi subtitles, part of a catalogue shaped around a smooth Farsi-language experience for diaspora audiences. A free K-Time account is all that's needed to watch.