05/09/2007

Last year, Alfonso Cuarón's Children of men was introducing to the Lido the dystopia of a sick future with no children. Today, the English filmmaker Penny Woolcock describes a nightmarish near-future in Exodus, screening in world premiere in the Horizons section.

It is no coincidence if the title sounds biblical, as do the names of the characters, Moses (Daniel Percival) and Pharoah (Bernard Hill). In this new interpretation of the scriptures, the Old Testament is brought to our time and we see all kinds of undesirable characters (drug-dealers, pedophiles, immigrants) stuck in a quiet seaside city. Moses, saved from the water, is adopted by populist leader Pharoah (who is “the little fascist in all of us", says the director). Later, he leads the rebellion of the inhabitants of Dreamland (a nice name for a nightmarish prison) to win, amongst other things, the heart of Zipporah, played by Clare-Hope Ashitey, who was already in Children of men.

In the Spanish-Mexican movie La zona [+see also:
trailer
film profile] ( screening at Venice Days), upper-classes live inside the barbed-wired fence of a protected zone (as George A. Romero predicted in Land of the Dead). In Exodus, the "last survivors" live in a concentration despite several appeals from the UN. The metaphor could not be clearer (the film even calls those survivors the "Jews of the 21th Century"), but for lack of a providential god, the seven plagues of Egypt turn into terrorist acts. Unfortunately, violence breeds violence in this desperate Middle-Agey world recreated on location in Margate (South of England) and partly interpreted by non-professionnal locals.

Exodus, written by Penny Woolcock herself, was produced by Artangel and Channel 4. Other investors include Creative Partnerships, Arts Council England, Kent County Council, and The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.

(Translated from Italian)