45 Years

45 Years follows Kate and Geoff Mercer in the week before the party marking their forty-fifth wedding anniversary. A letter arrives telling Geoff that the body of Katya, the woman he loved and lost before he met Kate, has been recovered from a glacier where she fell decades earlier. As Geoff is drawn back to that earlier attachment, Kate begins to reassess the whole shape of their life together.

The film is a precise account of jealousy and the return of the repressed, of how a buried history can reshape a marriage that seemed settled. It attends to what goes unspoken between long-married people and to the quiet, late reckoning with a rival who was never truly gone. It won Silver Bears for Best Actor and Best Actress at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival, and is based on the short story In Another Country by David Constantine.