Besides Blu-ray and DVD, George Miller’s fantasy romantic drama Three Thousand Years of Longing will also be released in 4K UHD. Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, who appear in the film, expressed their enthusiasm about the opportunity to make a tale about storytelling.
Swinton plays the great sorcerer The Ancient One, and Elba plays Heimdall, Gatekeeper of Asgard, although in these films they have quite different roles than their MCU counterparts.
In Three Thousand Years of Longing, the figures of The Ancient One and Heimdall are shown as two humans, one human and one Djinn, who are constantly gaining insight into the world around them. The film is about one of Swinton’s favourite topics—”inarticulacy, or rather the effort that humans take to communicate with one another,” she remarked in an August interview with AP News—so it was exciting for her to make a movie “quite like this.” According to Elba, “suddenly, I could give you the finest tale in the world, because I was making you believe I could,” when he was acting. He also mentioned how much he enjoyed listening to his father tell stories. Playing “a man who was not permitted to act his socks off but had to convey these honest, compelling stories” was a great challenge for him. Swinton portrays Dr Alithea Binnie, the narratologist in Three Thousand Years of Longing, while Elba plays a Djinn, a magical figure.
Dr Binnie meets the Djinn in Istanbul, where she is attending a conference. In exchange for his release, the Djinn grants her three wishes, but only if she makes sure that each one is exactly what she wants. As a scholar and rational human being who has heard tales of what occurs when wishes backfire, Binnie is sceptical that Djinn even exists. In order to persuade her of his reality, Djinn relates the story of how he came to be imprisoned in the bottle. After listening to the stories, Binnie makes a wish that leads them both down an unexpected road.
Miller helms and co-wrote (with Augusta Gore) the film Three Thousand Years of Longing, which is inspired by A.S. Byatt’s short tale The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. Miller and Doug Mitchell are acknowledged as producers, with Dean Hood, Craig McMahon, and Kevin Sun as executive producers, and Rachael Gill as associate producers. Including HDR, the 4K UHD edition will be available for $34.99 on November 15, with the Blu-ray and DVD releases also available on that date for $34.98 and $29.98, respectively.