Three Thousand Year of Longing is a film that tries to do the impossible with its cast. It is a love story about truth and power. It is more of a metaphor than it is a story about love.
The film is based on a 1994 novella called The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye and follows Narratology Professor Alithea Binnie as she travels to Turkey for an academic conference. She picked up a glass bottle with a Djinn in it. The Djinn knows better than most what happens when humans mess with magic when she tries to convince Alithea.
The narratives come to life on screen as the two characters exchange stories. We are taken to the land of Canaan, the ancient Ottoman empire and medieval Italy as the Djinn tells his story. Alithea listens but can't convince her to make a wish The power dynamics between the Djinn and Alithea seem to shift between them throughout the film.
The style of the movie is between conversations and fantasy. It is similar to Tarsem Singh's 2006 film, The Fall, where the story and the storytellers pass the narrative along as the film progresses. There is something gratifying about watching the theories of storytellers play out on screen, even if they try to justify their own story. It raises a lot of questions about who gets to tell stories and what they become.
He spoke about the power of stories. The world is coming to a point where it is no longer possible to tell a good story. He said that there was a new dawn. The fallibility of the storytellers is starting to be understood by audiences. It is possible for people in power to tell a story and change everyone's perspective for both good and bad.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is both respectful and skeptical of storytellers. The organisms that use stories to move each other are us. It's important that a film like this gives the audience a chance to really think about what they're reading, who it's coming from, and what's the origin of it. If you told it again, what would it be like? The trajectory of the story and who gets to tell it can be determined by these questions.
George Miller is the director of Three Thousand Years of Longing Augusta Gore helped write the script for the adaptation of the novella. He uses the parts of the story that help him talk about the act of storytellers in cinema. He wants to combine the drama of the fantastic with the ache of humanity. Sometimes life will end with grace and other times it will end suddenly. Being a Djinn is a threat to life. Miller says that stories exist to take up the space between.
The characters in the movie are aware that they are a part of the story, which is unusual. As Alithea pushes the Djinn to explain himself, he doesn't hesitate to answer her questions. Carefully, delicately (so as not to frighten her), he tells her his story until his bottle ends up in her hands.
Alithea keeps asking questions and her curiosity gets the better of her throughout her time with the Djinn. She is driven by a need to understand the reasons behind the Djinn. Alithea thinks that this creature knows that he is not to be trusted by virtue of his own confession. She said that Alithea is a character on the precipice of transformation, and that her curiosity is what leads to the movie's future. She comes into the narrative having made a lot of decisions about her life and she has a certain amount of self satisfaction. She changes against all the odds.
The strength of Three Thousand Years of Longing is in its own way. There is a story about how stories fit into the modern world. The film takes the fantastic and makes it into colors and themes that we can easily identify. There are some points in the movie that are tied up in themselves, but they never last very long. Alithea is a character that we can all see ourselves in, a reminder that the answer to the question, "what would I do in this story?" is not as simple as it might seem.
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