Atom Egoyan (Adoration) and Directors' Notes (Appreciation)

A quickie today. Film Studies For Free hopes you'll check out the great, 10 minute long, podcast (and streaming audio) with Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan, whose new film Adoration showed at last night's London Film Festival. The podcast is brought to you by Directors' Notes (see below for more info). As for Adoration, Sandra Hebron, artistic director of the LFF (see a video interview with her HERE), writes,

This twelfth feature from Atom Egoyan begins with a teacher setting an assignment to a class of high school students, and this seemingly everyday exercise is the catalyst for an exploration of the ways in which we make connections – with each other, with our families and our personal histories, with new technology and the modern world. When Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) asks her class to translate a news story about a terrorist who plants a bomb in the airline luggage of his pregnant girlfriend, this has a profound effect on one of the students, Simon ([Devon Bostick]). Re-imagining this to be his own family's story, he begins to perpetuate this fictitious history via internet chatrooms. [...]

Ambitious in structure and scope, Adoration unfolds as a multi-layered mystery story in which chronology is fractured, and narrators sometimes unreliable. The rich visual texture of the film reflects this, combining sumptuous 35mm photography with images from the internet and mobile phones. Woven through with themes of terrorism, prejudice and fear, Adoration is unfailingly intelligent and unquestionably timely. [with hyperlinks added by FSFF]

There's a good detailed review of the film by Cinematical. Other good links to Egoyan include: his company website; Girish Shambu's Senses of Cinema essay on the director ('The Pleasure And Pain Of "Watching": Atom Egoyan's Exotica'); a very good survey piece at the Canadian Film Encyclopedia/Film Reference Library; another one at MovieMaker.com; and another, really excellent, very detailed, and more 'academic' one at Bright Lights Film Journal, by David L. Pike. Some great YouTube videos related to Atom Egoyan are HERE. And a really interesting Cineaste interview with Egoyan online HERE at The Free Library.

Film Studies For Free urges you to explore what's on offer more generally at Directors' Notes; it's a nicely organised site that brings weekly podcasts with indie directors and other film personnel, along with up-to-date and varied reviews, and other news and articles. RSS feed available HERE.