The full-length, official trailer for Mad Max director George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing offers an extended glimpse at the sensory onslaught that is this fantastic romance. Released courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Three Thousand Years of Longing will be an epic in every sense of the word as a conversation between a scholar and a Djinn takes on a journey across time and space, asking profound questions along the way.
Based on the short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” by A.S. Byatt, Three Thousand Years of Longing follows Dr. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is an academic – content with life, and a creature of reason. While in Istanbul attending a conference, she happens to encounter a Djinn (Idris Elba) who offers her three wishes in exchange for his freedom.
This presents two problems. First, she doubts that he is real, and second, because she is a scholar of story and mythology, she knows all the cautionary tales of wishes gone wrong. The Djinn pleads his case by telling her fantastical stories of his past. Eventually, she is beguiled and makes a wish that surprises them both.
Directed by George Miller, who co-wrote the screenplay with Augusta Gore, Three Thousand Years of Longing stars Idris Elba as the Djinn, Tilda Swinton as Alithea, Aamito Lagum as Queen of Sheba, Burcu Gölgedar as Zefir, and Matteo Bocelli as Prince Mustafa.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is an Allegorical Fairy Story
George Miller has provided some insight into what Three Thousand Years of Longing is at its core, with the filmmaker describing the tale as a “a fairy story” that has a lot more going on under the surface. “What I saw in the short story was that it probed a lot of stuff,” Miller explained. “There was a lot of detail, in a relatively compact narrative, about all the mysteries and paradoxes of being human, or of being alive as a human. And, of course, it was allegorical; it’s a fairy story.”
The conversation at the center of the story will take both Tilda Swinton’s academic and the audience on a journey across the world, exploring different periods of history and providing important lessons along the way. Three Thousand Years of Longing will attempt to balance the mythical with the factual all along the way, as Miller explains; “There’s no historical record of the Queen of Sheba [played in the film by Aamito Lagum]. She’s in mythology more than she is in history. So, we had to think about what that world would be. If you notice that world, it’s much more fantastical compared to the real world that we end up at by the end, and there are all sorts of variations along that path. But you had to come to some understanding in your own mind as to what that was like.”
The tale will leap across the Ottoman Empire and 19th Century Turkey, as well as exploring the "modern world with all its apparent dysfunction,” with the film dancing between fantasy and reality throughout. “But remember, this film is also a fantasy played out in the mind of Alithea as she’s being told the story, or in the Djinn’s retelling,” Miller said.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is due to premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival today.