‘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.