Chilean Amenabar premieres 'Agora' at Cannes

With the premiere of his historical epic "Agora," Chilean director Alejandro Amenábar introduced audiences at the Cannes Film Festival to the little-known scholar Hypatia, an astronomer and mathematician working in 4th century Egypt. 

Here's a synopsis: IV century … Egypt under the Roman Empire … Violent religious upheaval in the streets of Alexandria spills over into the city’s legendary Library. Trapped within its walls, the brilliant astronomer Hypatia fights, with the help of her disciples, to save the wisdom of the Ancient World…. Among those disciples, the two men who are fighting for her heart: the witty, privileged Orestes and Davus, Hypatia’s young slave who is torn between his secret love for her and the freedom he knows can be his if he chooses to join the unstoppable surge of the Christians.

During a press conference in Cannes, Amenábar said that although the film is set in the past, its themes are quite contemporary: "From the writing point of view, once we started researching, we realized that this particular time and world had a lot of connections with our contemporary reality. We realized that in making a movie about the past, we were actually making a movie about the present." 

Rachel Weisz, who plays Hypatia in the movie, admitted to discovering her own sense of sexism during the process of making the film: "Recently, I was looking through some e-mails that Alejandro and I had, before we started the film. And I was noticing that I said to him, 'Can't she just kiss Davus, maybe once?' Alejandro was very strong about it; he just said, 'This is a person who is completely devoted and passionate about her work. There have been so many stories told about men who were obsessionally into their work, and no one would ever say, 'Well, hold on, why doesn't he get married?' It was fascinating to me to see how my own sexism came up, if you like."

You can see a video of the press conference here on the Cannes Film Festival website.

Patrick Goldstein talks more about the film, which premiered Sunday, on our The Big Picture blog here, referring to a conversation he had with Amenábar:

When Amenabar and I spoke on the phone on Friday -- he was still in Madrid, preparing to leave for Cannes -- I asked him if the similarities were by chance or by design. He laughed, "I guess I should ask Gabriella Pescucci [his costume designer] if she did that on purpose. But yes, the movie is definitely a condemnation of fundamentalism. It's about the moment in history when the Christians were finished being persecuted and began to persecute others. The costumes are very true to the period, but I realize that the robes and beards look very much like the Taliban."

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City