GREATEST DAYS follows the story of five school friends who have the night of their lives at a concert from their favourite 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) – idolise the boy band they tune in religiously every week to watch on Top Of The Pops.
When feeling anxious or troubled, Rachel even summons The Boys – played by Aaron Bryan, Dalvin Sol, Joshua Jung, Mark Samaras and Mervin Noronha – from her imagination and into her reality. When they appear, the world around her comes alive, turning the mundane into the magical. Their songs are used to mute the monotony and disappointments of childhood, as the boys appear from cupboards and in the reflections to offer a constant imaginary companionship to Rachel and her friends.
Some 25 years later Rachel (played in this other timeline 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 the modern-day Claire (Jayde Adams), Zoe (Amaka Okafor) and Heather (Alice Lowe) along for the experience.
The story flashes back and forth between 1996, with the girls at the height of their friendship and fandom, and present-day Athens, where the four women are struggling to reconnect after spending their entire adult lives apart.
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 saying, “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 a heart-warming film which deals with the universal themes of friendship, fandom, loss and reconciliation, and opens in SA on 16 June 2023 but you can check out the trailer below in the meantime.
