Zeitgeist Films in association with Kino Lorber, will release Eva Vitija’s Loving Highsmith, an intimate documentary portrait of the novelist Patricia Highsmith that casts new light on her life and oeuvre. Zeitgeist Films will release the film theatrically this September.

Based on Patricia Highsmith’s personal writings and accounts of her family and lovers, including newly published diaries and notebooks, Loving Highsmith made its world premiere at the Sydney Film Festival and bows at the Frameline Film Festival later in June.

Loving Highsmith is a unique look at the life of celebrated American author Patricia Highsmith, focusing on Highsmith’s quest for love and her troubled identity through her personal diaries and the intimate reflections of her lovers, friends and family. The film sheds new light on her life and writing, the best known of which were adapted for the big screen: Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Carol, a partially autobiographical novel and the first lesbian story with a happy ending in 1950s America. But Highsmith herself was forced to lead a double life and had to hide her vibrant love affairs from her family and the public, reflecting on the ever-present subject only in her unpublished writings. Beautifully interweaving archival material of Highsmith and her most famous adaptations with excerpts from her unpublished writing voiced by actress Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones), Loving Highsmith is a vivid, touching portrait of one of our most fascinating and complex writers.

“I am very excited that Loving Highsmith has been selected by Zeitgeist and Kino Lorber for North American release. They have distributed some of my favorite quality documentaries by the greatest directors, and I hope that this will give Patricia Highsmith the recognition in her home country that she has always deserved!” said director Eva Vitija.