Academy-award winning actress Tilda Swinton and the multi-talented Idris Elba star in “Three Thousand Years of Longing”, directed by George Miller, the film is a sweeping fantasy romantic adventure that trails the adventures of a solitary academic and the magical genie-in-a-bottle.
Swinton plays narratologist Dr. Alithea Binnie, someone who studies stories through the ages while Elba takes on the role of Djinn aka Genie. Their worlds intertwine as Dr. Binnie unknowingly picks up a magical bottle from a pile of relics to bring home from her trip. Once settled in her room, she eventually unleashes a genie from the bottle who offers her three wishes in exchange for her freedom. Desperate to gain her trust for his freedom, Djinn takes Dr. Binnie on an epic adventure recalling his 3000 years being in and out of the bottle.
To see the film in a cinema is the filmmakers’ greatest hope for audiences. “When we go into the cinema, it’s a kind of public dreaming,” says Miller. “You are invited into the story, and hopefully caught up in it. Sharing dreams with strangers, on the big screen. We worked so hard on the images and sounds, making them congruent. We tried to tell a story that keeps you leaning forward in your seat and, if it’s any good, to follow you out of the cinema.”
“Three Thousand Years of Longing” is not just giving us a good story, it’s also about the importance of stories,” adds Elba. “I’m hoping that we continue to find ingenious ways to engage an audience in a story. You could quite easily sit around the tree, or a fire and tell the story of Alithea meeting the Djinn, and it would still be compelling, but with what George and our team created around it, visually, sonically, is amazing.”
For Tilda Swinton, “even though George wanted to make this film years ago, there’s never been a better time to make this film and for audiences to reconsider how important narrative is in our lives. What happened to us with the pandemic, and other global forces, there’s been a threat to the possibility of us being able to create narratives. We’re getting used to finding a way to renegotiate how we create narratives. Being story-less is not a good place for human beings to be. It is a threat to our mental health. This film is a real opportunity for people to re-evaluate and re-worship story as an essential part of how we work. So, bring on Three Thousand Years of Longing, to reboot the narrative drive in our systems.”
From Go Asia Entertainment, experience wonder in cinemas once again when Three Thousand Years of Longing opens September 14.
