One of my Hollywood favorites stars in Agora, a film directed and written by Alejandro Amenábar, and featuring the always lovely Rachel Weisz and Max Minghella (Art School Confidential). Amenábar won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2005 for his Mar adentro (The Sea Inside). Looks like a lot bigger of a film than I had expected before I watched.
Film Synopsis:
4th century A.D. Egypt under the Roman Empire… Violent religious upheaval in the streets of Alexandria spills over into the city’s famous Library. Trapped inside its walls, the brilliant astronomer Hypatia and her disciples fight to save the wisdom of the Ancient World… Among them, the two men competing 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.
Agora was screened at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and will be widely released on December 18th, 2009.
Wow – looks exactly like my kind of movie. I love that someone has finally made a movie about the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria, which in many respect heralded the end of the world of Antiquity – and the defeat of science and philosophy to the ferocity of religious fanaticism. I’m looking forward to “Agora”.