Review: Joanna Hogg's 'The Souvenir' is a filmmaker's exquisitely moving self-portrait

At the start of Joanna Hogg's semi-autobiographical drama, "The Souvenir," we hear a young filmmaker outlining her first feature: a grotty working-class narrative set in the shipyards of Sunderland, a city in the North of England. It isn't a world that Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), a 24-year-old film student living in London's affluent Knightsbridge district, knows particularly well. Still, the warmth and intelligence we hear in her voice suggests that she could very well tap into her inner Ken Loach, in part because she seems aware of the potential challenges of doing so.

Questions of narrative ownership, of which stories an artist has the right to tell, seem to arise fairly frequently in modern cultural discourse. We consume art in an era that prides itself on its inclusiveness