An Education

In suburban London at the start of the 1960s, sixteen-year-old Jenny is an academically gifted schoolgirl bound for Oxford when she meets David, an older and worldly man who draws her into concerts, restaurants and trips abroad. As the romance deepens she reconsiders her future, until the reality of who David is forces a reckoning.

The film treats seduction as a coming-of-age of the psyche, tracing idealisation, the pull of the forbidden and the painful loss of innocence that follows disillusion. It gives a therapist a clear picture of how an adolescent invests an older figure with fantasy and what it costs to recover from that. It won the World Cinema Audience Award at Sundance in 2009, and is adapted from the memoir An Education by Lynn Barber.