Between Mad Max: Fury Road and his forthcoming Furiosa, George Miller has directed the fantasy drama Three Thousand Years of Longing, coming at the end of August from MGM. It follows a scholar (Tilda Swinton) who encounters a Djinn (Idris Elba) offering her three wishes. A first trailer has arrived as the film debuts at Cannes, revealing another epic, ambitious adventure from the director.
“If people are too busy scrolling through their cellphones, on TikTok and Instagram and whatever else, you have to acknowledge those things are addictive simply because they’re telling stories in such a quick and efficient way,” Miller recently told Deadline, “We are speedreading the moving image now, and if you don’t take account for that in your cinema… That’s not to say you can’t have slow-burning films, but there has to be a dramatic purpose to them.
An adaptation of A.S. Byatt’s short story, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, the follows Dr. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), 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.
See the trailer and poster below.
Three Thousand Years of Longing opens on August 31.