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'Adoration' A Simple Family Story, Says Director Egoyan

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  • 'Adoration' A Simple Family Story, Says Director Egoyan

    'ADORATION' A SIMPLE FAMILY STORY, SAYS DIRECTOR EGOYAN

    Agence France Presse
    May 23 2008

    CANNES, France (AFP) -- Canada's Atom Egoyan, in the running for
    the Cannes festival top prize with "Adoration," said the complex,
    multi-themed film is at heart a simple story of an orphan who wants
    to find out what happened to his parents.

    "The story of his parents is kept from him for various reasons and
    as a result he's compelled to create his own story," he said in
    an interview.

    But the movie's simple premise provides a backdrop for a flurry of
    themes such as the impact of new media on our lives, inter-cultural
    miscommunication, victimhood, and the collective fears of the
    post-September 11 world.

    "I think the most predominant theme is how do we negotiate family
    histories," Egoyan, whose work often deals with alienation and the
    subjective nature of truth, told AFP.

    "Every family has a central myth and that myth is based on an
    arrangement of events that may or may not have happened, that are used
    to sustain illusions or aspirations of what that family should be."

    "Adoration" tells how a Toronto school teacher, played by the
    director's wife Arsine Khanjian, asks her students to translate from
    French a magazine article about a Middle Eastern terrorist who plants a
    bomb in his pregnant girlfriend's bag as she is about to take a flight.

    One of her students, Simon, played by Devon Bostick, turns the exercise
    into a fictional quest in which the couple become his parents.

    His real parents, one Canadian and the other Lebanese, died in a car
    accident which Simon suspects was deliberately caused by his father.

    He goes online with his fictional family history and rapidly sparks
    a flood of video chatroom reactions.

    "His friends respond with disbelief, asking why he had never told
    them this before," said Egoyan. "And then there are responses from
    people who were on that plane, mourning a catastrophe that never
    happened. The story gets very dense with all these possibilities."

    "Then it all gets stripped away as we come to understand what's
    actually happening," said Egoyan, whose 12th feature film premiered
    late Thursday, one of the 22 films in the running for the Palme d'Or
    prize to be announced Sunday.

    The teenager has to move beyond the cyberworld and find real objects
    and places to give meaning to his life, "as opposed to the instant
    meaning accorded to the sea of responses he is dealing with over the
    Internet," said the director.

    The complex plot is classic Egoyan fare. As in his previous works
    "The Sweet Hereafter" and "Exotica," a series of flashbacks and the
    unfolding plot slowly reveal the truth of the unlikely connections
    between a group of people.

    Egoyan's own background explains his interest in cross-cultural
    issues. He grew up in Canada, where he still lives, but is of Armenian
    origin and was born in Cairo.
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