Agnieszka Smoczyńskai and The Silent Twins
Some filmmakers tell stories. Others build entire worlds. Polish writer-director Agnieszka Smoczyńska belongs firmly in the latter category, and her conversation with host Duane Hansen Fernandez on The Smith Society is a rare, intimate look at the mind behind one of cinema's most visually arresting works in recent memory.
The subject: The Silent Twins, the extraordinary true story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, two Black twin sisters from Barbados who grew up in Wales and made a pact to communicate only with each other. Based on Marjorie Wallace's bestselling book and written by Andrea Siegel, the film stars Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance in performances that are as haunting as they are unforgettable.
Smoczyńska's path to The Silent Twins began with a Facebook message. Screenwriter Andrea Siegel had seen Smoczyńska's debut feature, The Lure, a darkly surreal Polish mermaid musical, and reached out cold, sensing that this director might understand her script in a way others wouldn't. She was right.
"I knew that I just want to tell the story," Smoczyńska recalls, "and I knew that I have to bring the story to the world."
What drew her in was the central tension at the heart of June and Jennifer's lives: two girls who refused to speak to the outside world, yet desperately wanted to be heard. They enrolled in a course called the Art of Communication. They wrote novels, diaries, and poetry. Their silence was never indifference. It was a fortress built around an overflowing interior life.
Crafting a compelling narrative around characters who don't speak to the world around them presented an obvious challenge. Smoczyńska's solution was to go deeper into the twins' inner lives rather than around them. She immersed herself in their writings, studying what films they might have watched, what books they read, what television they consumed during the years depicted in the story. She then gathered her collaborators, including director of photography Jakub Kijowski, sound designer, composer Zuzanna Łapicka, and her production designer, and they built the film's visual and sonic language together, asking at every turn: what would June and Jennifer have imagined?
The result is a film that uses animation, fantasy sequences, and richly textured production design to externalize an internal world. "I started to imagine how we can use cinema to tell more about them as writers, as artists," she explains.
One sequence in particular stopped Fernandez cold while watching: a surreal, choreographed setpiece following a pivotal moment in the story, shot partly in a swimming pool. It is the kind of scene that, in a studio production, might take a week and a half to shoot with a full crew. Smoczyńska filmed it in six hours, with two of those hours in the water.
"It's not like you go and have only six hours," she clarifies. "You prepare for months for this."
The sequence draws on the twins' likely exposure to Hollywood musicals of the era, with the swimmers in the pool echoing the Waynes, men the twins had encountered in their lives.
Every visual choice circles back to character. It always does, with Smoczyńska. That discipline extended into color. The cool, bluish-green palette of the twins' home shifts to warmer, more luminous tones whenever the film enters their visionary inner world, a distinction worked out in close collaboration with her director of photography. Even the music was chosen with care: the haunting Amanda Lear track Enigma, selected purely for the quality of the singer's voice, threads through the film with an eerie elegance that feels inevitable in retrospect.
Smoczyńska studied art history, not film, and it shows in the best possible way. Her frames are composed like paintings; her sets are curated like installations. But when asked about the deepest influence on her work, she points not to a painter or a director, but to her mother. Growing up, her mother managed a restaurant in Warsaw and ran it with rigor and warmth. "What I learned from her," Smoczyńska says simply, "is empathy. Empathy is the most important thing."
It is an answer that explains a great deal about The Silent Twins, a film that refuses to sensationalize its subjects, that insists on entering their imaginations rather than judging their choices, and that asks its audience to journey alongside June and Jennifer rather than observe them from a distance.
When asked what she hopes audiences carry with them out of the theater, Smoczyńska's answer is characteristically direct: "I hope they will be very deeply moved by Jennifer and June's story, and by their relationship."
Complex, painful, beautiful, and utterly singular, the story of the Gibbons twins deserves exactly the kind of telling it received. The Silent Twins is a film about wanting to be known, and Agnieszka Smoczyńska makes sure, in every frame, that they are.
Listen to the full conversation with Agnieszka Smoczyńska on The Smith Society podcast, available on Apple Podcasts and wherever you listen. The Silent Twins screenplay was written by Andrea Siegel, based on the book by Marjorie Wallace. The Smith Society is produced by VOKSEE.
THE SILENT TWINS is presented by Focus Features and is in theaters September 16th
Starring: Letitia Wright, Tamara Lawrance
Kuba Kijowski - Director of Photography
Jagna Dobesz - Production Designer
Dumebi Anozie - Hair & Makeup Designer
Katarzyna Lewińska - Costume Designer
Agnieszka Glińska - Editor
Produced by: Klaudia Śmieja-Rostworowska, Joshua Horsfield, Anita Gou, Ben Pugh, Ewa Puszczynska
Official Website for The Silent Twins
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Host: Duane Fernandez
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