Tandem, Canada
May 8 2008

Atom Egoyan’s Alternate World

Canadian director returns to Cannes with film exploring identity and
technology

By Paola Bernardini

`Films confront things, the most extreme of things, they look them in
the face, they analyze them. The role of art is to imagine that which
one is afraid to confront in life. Perhaps it provides us with new
ways to overcome fear in real life.’

In his new film Adoration, Atom Egoyan confronts the fear of a virtual
separation between mind and body and, therefore, the paranoia that
technology will replace humankind. The film explores a type of
artificial intelligence, with the possibile risk of coming face to
face with a computer that has the capacity of human thought, but in
the end, reason overcomes fantasy and encounters the reinterpretation
of an individual identity.

Adoration, written and directed by Egoyan and a candidate for the
Palme d’Or at the 61st edition of the Cannes Film Festival (May 14 –
25), centres on a high-school student who is fascinated by technology
and above all by the idea of recreating two historical figures.

Virtual reality is skewed with everyday life and the protagonist’s
obsession comes to life when he creates a new identity for himself on
the Internet, a place where he also encounters threats because of his
contact with issues such as international terrorism. Through the
Internet, the boy also drags his circle of friends into his unique
journey, where they face suffering caused by a tragedy that never took
place. This struggle takes place all through the medium of their
computer monitors, a space where video is the sole means of
communication.

In this film, Egoyan uses a traditional maze-like structure to entrap
the audience, including parallel scenarios, and of course there is
always a secret hidden in his plots.

`When I began to explore technology in the 1980s, I thought that
certain multimedia instruments serve only to distance us from each
other,’ the director said. `But then I convinced myself that techology
actually connects us more than we could have ever imagined.’

The idea for Egoyan’s latest film was born some 20 years ago with a
news story: a Jordan teenager convinced his pregnant Irish friend to
board a plan, unaware of the fact that she was carrying a bomb in her
purse. This story is transposed in the film as the protagonist
fantasizes about a similar scenario.

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