The media circus that was the Amanda Knox trial has been adapted to a new medium. Michael Winterbottom’s film The Face of an Angel, inspired by the Amanda Knox story, is in U.S. theaters June 19.
Film adaptations of the Amanda Knox trial probably were inevitable. But Winterbottom’s version focuses more on the media circus side of the story than you might expect. The film is adapted from Angel Face: Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox by Daily Beast writer Barbie Latza Nadeau.
Nadeau didn’t just inspire the film—she also became a character in it. In the movie, Kate Beckinsale plays an American journalist whose book is adapted by a filmmaker intent on solving the crime.
You can read Nadeau’s account of the strange experience of having her book and identity fictionalized for the screen here.
In the real—and sometimes surreal—world of Italian justice, Amanda Knox was convicted in the November 2007 murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher, then acquitted on appeal, convicted again, and finally definitively acquitted this year.