Central to GREATEST DAYS is the idea that music not only has the ability to capture our feelings, aspirations, and yearnings but can also transport and connect us to different places, people, and events.
The film follows the story of five school friends who have the night of their lives at a concert by their favorite boy band. Growing up in Lancashire in 1993, 16-year-old Rachel (Lara McDonnell) and her gang of four best friends – Debbie (Jessie Mae Alonzo), Claire (Carragon Guest), Zoe (Nandi Hudson) and Heather (Eliza Dobson) – idolize the boy band they watch religiously every week watch on the TV show Top Of The Pops.
Some 25 years later Rachel (played by Aisling Bea) wins a local radio competition to see The Boys on their reunion tour in Greece. She decides to reconnect with the teenage best friends she hasn’t spoken to for decades and invites Claire (Jayde Adams), Zoe (Amaka Okafor), and Heather (Alice Lowe) along for the experience.
The story flashes back and forth between 1996, and present-day Athens, where the four women are struggling to reconnect after spending their adult lives apart.
Plans for the film were originally announced by Take That members Gary Barlow, Mark Owen, and Howard Donald following the success of their West End musical The Band.
However, the British pop legends, who have sold over 14 million albums in a career that, over 33 years, has featured 28 top 40 singles and eight Brit awards amongst a host of other accolades, are quick to point out that the film is not about them, but rather those who were ultimately responsible for their success – their fans. The band worked closely with the production team on the movie and even make a cameo appearance in the film.
Directing the adaptation is multi-BAFTA-winning Coky Giedroyc. GREATEST DAYS is a movie about many things. It’s a movie about life, love and loss; how the mates and memories we make as teenagers will stay with us always, somewhere deep inside. It’s a love letter to friendship,” she says. “It’s also a movie about music. Specifically, the power that songs have to transport us, wherever and whenever we are in our lives, back to the moment we first heard them. The moment we first felt them. A movie that reminds us to never lose sight of the person we were in that moment, and the person we could maybe still become.”
Writer Tim Firth echoes this. “The film is not about Take That, the band. It’s not even about their songs specifically. It’s about music. About the power of music at one time in your life to absorb everything at that time. Your loves, your losses, your quarrels. What built you.”
GREATEST DAYS is distributed locally by Filmfinity (Pty) Ltd. and opens in cinemas on 16 June 2023.
Watch the trailer here:
