Three Thousand Years of Longing
Wednesday, August 17, 2022 10:57:20 AM | (Age Not Specified)
The film is based on A.S. Byatt's short story ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ first published in 1994. The homosapiens should rather be more homo-narrans. That the storytelling ape is really what we're, more than wise; or rather, maybe the wisdom comes from being storytellers. How do you make it feel progressive? Where to up the emotion, where to lower, where to become quiet, where to get loud? Within that one space, it's a jigsaw. What happens with jumping to third person to let the listener fill in the blanks? If you do a little digging, you start to see that some of the greatest storytellers do it naturally and some do it in a more manipulated way. Significant changes are made to the screenplay, first with Zoom rehearsals, then in the room together, to examine every dimension of the screenplay. What's most important is the interplay between the two characters. What the conflict between them reveals. It’s not so much what an individual actor does, but what the two of them do to each other. The film plays out first in a hotel room in Istanbul, then back and forth between the shifting timeframes of the Djinn’s past and the present, with a third act set in a house in London.
When we go into the cinema, it’s a kind of public dreaming, You are invited into the story, and hopefully caught up in it. Sharing dreams with strangers, on the big screen. "Three Thousand Years Of Longing" sits as a time capsule, 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's a threat to our mental health. So, bring on "Three Thousand Years Of Longing", to re-evaluate the narrative drive in our systems.
Written by Gregory Mann
