Ritesh Batra, director of Indian romance The Lunchbox, to make English language debut on drama about one man’s journey into memory

The Oscar-winning actor Jim Broadbent will play a retired divorcee delving into unreliable memories in the drama The Sense of an Ending, based on Julian Barnes’s Booker prize-winning novel, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Described by the Guardian’s Justine Jordan as a “highly wrought meditation on ageing, memory and regret”, Barnes’s book won the famous literary award in 2011. It is told from the perspective of Tony Webster, a man who comes to lament his lack of ambition after receiving a mysterious legacy that causes him to reevaluate his life and youthful memories.

The Sense of an Ending will be directed by the Indian film-maker Ritesh Batra, best known for the Bafta-nominated epistolary romance The Lunchbox, from a debut screenplay by British playwright Nick Payne. It is being financed by BBC Films and New York-based FilmNation, with Origin Pictures’ David Thompson and Ed Rubin on board as producers, and will be touted to potential buyers at this week’s Cannes film festival.

“It’s been a thrill to watch Nick’s first screenplay take shape and to match his brilliantly engaging adaptation of Julian’s intriguing novel with such an exciting filmmaker as Ritesh,” said BBC Films’ Christine Langan. “We’re over the moon to have the wonderful Jim Broadbent take centre stage in this exciting contemporary story and to partner again with Glen at FilmNation and our friends David and Ed at Origin.”

FilmNation CEO Glen Basner said: “The Lunchbox charmed and delighted worldwide audiences and we expect the same reaction to this wonderful script, especially with the supremely talented and charismatic Mr Broadbent in the lead.”

Batra’s previous film, about a young Mumbai woman whose lovingly prepared lunches are accidentally delivered to a lonely and receptive widower rather than her distant and disinterested husband, won the Critics Week viewers choice award, also known as Grand Rail d’Or, at Cannes’s 2013 festival. It also won Ritesh the Toronto Film Critics Association award for best first feature at Toronto, and was nominated for the best foreign language film prize at this year’s Baftas.

Broadbent, 65, won the best supporting actor Oscar for Iris, Richard Eyre’s 2001 biopic in which he starred opposite Judi Dench as the Alzheimer’s disease-stricken author Iris Murdoch.