Filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar won the Oscar for the Best Foreign Film with his 2004 The Sea Inside, a plea to legalize voluntary euthanasia. Now he is stepping out in Cannes for the first time with Agora, a historical drama set in 4th-century Alexandria, Egypt.
At that time, Egypt was ruled by Rome, and rebellion was brewing among the Christians. In the film, the brilliant astronomer-philosopher Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) and her disciples are barricaded inside the great Library, attempting to preserve the knowledge that has been accumulated over the centuries. But there’s a battle outside…
“Four years ago, I’d never have believed that my next film would be about 4th-century Egypt,” Alejandro Amenábar commented. “But that’s the beauty of this trade: you can let your curiosity guide you, and immerse yourself in fascinating worlds like Alexandria right before the fall… We tried to show that the human species is just one among all the others on the planet, and that Earth is only one among all the planets in the universe. I wanted to film human beings swarming like ants, and the Earth as some anonymous little ball following its orbit around a star among the others in the cosmos.”