Directed by David Lean and based on the play Still Life by Noël Coward, Brief Encounter follows a married woman and a doctor who begin an emotional affair after meeting by chance at a railway station. The film combines romantic drama with restrained British social realism as the two struggle with guilt, duty and forbidden love within the constraints of middle-class life. Brief Encounter received multiple Academy Award nominations and is closely associated with British romantic cinema of the 1940s.