Eva Husson’s new film “Mothering Sunday” is centered on a romance that defies class traditions, a topic that has fascinated audiences for ages. But the director’s upbringing informed this story in a unique way.

“What I think is quite wonderful is that you have a lot of stories about the point of view of the upper class and what happens in the upper class,” Husson said at the Variety Lounge at BFI London Film Festival. “It’s ‘Downton Abbey’ and stuff like that. And the center of ‘Mothering Sunday’ is Jane’s journey. Jane is a working class person who gets to be middle class and that’s through art. I think the liberating power of art is at the center. Coming myself from middle class and coming from a background of teachers and finding myself sharing the film in festivals around the world, it feels very close to my own journey in that sense.”

“I also think that [it’s] a time when classes are getting divided again at a very, very deep level… I think we leave the era, a golden era, let’s say, in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s where the middle class was big and we could enjoy a lot of things,” Husson continued. “And I think things are getting really, really hard for the middle class again. I think it’s very interesting to get to see a movie like this and remind ourselves collectively what horrible conditions we can go to in terms of working conditions and how we can extract ourselves from that.”

Husson also spoke to Variety’s chief film critic Peter Debruge about how she connected to the central story about an artist feeling a bond with her writing.

“It was incredible that I felt very connected to material,” she said. “It felt very personal, yet it felt very not personal in the sense that it allowed myself to expose a lot of myself without having to say so. Whatever I relate to, I don’t have to disclose it, but [there’s] the whole relationship to creativity and the way one sees the world and the way one fills the world… I’m definitely a hypersensitive person and I sort of take the world in without filters the whole time. It’s actually quite incredible to tell the journey of how you receive things, and [how] you make sense of chaos, because grief and loss in life is chaos. I think the journey of Jane really shows you [that] with a lot of kindness and beauty.”

“Mothering Sunday” is set for a Nov. 19 theatrical release date.