Spanish filmmaker Alejandro Amenabar took Cannes back to Egypt 400 AD on Sunday with a toga-clad parable on religious extremism starring Rachel Weiss as a martyred philosopher.
Set in Alexandria during the dying days of the Roman Empire, the big-budget movie Agora charts the bloody struggles that pitted pagans and Jews against the early Christians seizing power across the Mediterranean region.
The 37-year-old director focuses on the little-known story of Hypatia, a philosopher and astronomer from Alexandria whose work on the solar system pitted her against the Church, a thousand years before Galileo.
Played by Oscar-winning British actress Weiss, Hypatia is persecuted in the film for her science that challenges the Christians faith, as much as for her status as an influential woman.
From bloody clashes to public stonings and massacres, the city descends into inter-religious strife, and the victorious Christians turn their back on the rich scientific legacy of antiquity, defended by Hypatia.
Amenabar said in an interview that he wanted the ?50 million Spanish production, shot in a recreated Alexandria on the island of Malta, to carry a message against intolerance and extremism.
Every time someone defends his ideas by using violence, that is what the movie is denouncing, he told AFP.
I would hate it for the whole world to think exactly like me. There have to be people who are progressive, other more conservative, people with religious ideas, atheists, agnostics.
We all need to live to gather in this Agora , as the city s public gathering place was known in antiquity.
Amenabar s Alexandria is stalked by thuggish gangs of hooded religious militia called the Parabalani, who veer into fanaticism as the film progresses, stoning unbelievers and terrorizing the population.
At first the Parabalani represented something appealing in the Church: compassion or help to really needing people in their city. And then they became an army for the Church. They shifted to the dark side of the force.
Agora opens with the destruction of the second library of Alexandria by the Christians and Jews – after the first, famous library which was destroyed by Julius Caesar.
The director also said he saw the film worked as a parable on the crisis of Western civilization.
Let s say the Roman Empire is the United States nowadays, and Alexandria is what Europe means now – the old civilization, the old cultural background.
And the empire is in crisis, which affects all the provinces. We are talking about social crisis, economic of course, this year, and cultural.
Something is not quite fitting in our society. We know that something is going to change – we don t know exactly what or how, but we know that something is coming to an end.
Screening out of competition in the Riviera festival s official selection, the film marks a radical break from Amenabar s last work, the Oscar-winning right-to-die movie Mar Adentro released in 2004.
Amenabar said he usually preferred to be in competition, but told AFP the film didn t fit the box for the Palme d Or race.
