Three Thousand Years of Longing

Three Thousand Years of Longing is a 2022 fantasy romantic drama film directed and produced by George Miller. Written by Miller and Augusta Gore, it is based on the 1994 short story "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" by A. S. Byatt and stars Idris Elba as a djinn who is unleashed from a bottle by a professor (Tilda Swinton) and tells her stories from his thousands of years of existence. The film is dedicated to Miller's mother Angela, as well as Rena Mitchell, relative of producer Doug Mitchell. The film premiered out of competition at the 75th Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 2022, where it received a six-minute standing ovation. It was released theatrically in the United States on August 26, 2022, by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (via United Artists Releasing), and in Australia on September 1, 2022, by Roadshow Entertainment. It received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised its visuals and performances, but was a box-office bomb, grossing $20.3 million against a budget of $60 million. Plot Alithea Binnie is a British narratology scholar who occasionally hallucinates demonic beings. During a trip to Istanbul, Alithea purchases an antique bottle and unleashes the Djinn trapped within it. The Djinn offers to grant Alithea three wishes, so long as each one is truly her heart's desire. However, Alithea argues that wishing is a mistake, accusing the Djinn of being a trickster. She says that when she was a child, she created an imaginary friend in the form of a young boy and even imagined his whole life (which she wrote in a diary) but decided to forget about him, fearing to be overwhelmed by her own imagination. In response, the Djinn proceeds to tell her three tales of his past and how he ended up trapped in the bottle. In the first story, the Queen of Sheba, the Djinn's cousin and lover, is wooed by King Solomon, who imprisons the Djinn in a bottle which is cast into the Red Sea by a bird. The second story centers on Gülten, a concubine in the palace of Suleiman the Magnificent. After finding the bottle, Gülten wishes for Suleiman's son, Mustafa, to fall in love with her and subsequently wishes to bear his child. Hürrem Sultan, a favored concubine of Suleiman, schemes to have her own son on the throne and convinces Suleiman that Mustafa is conspiring against him; this results in Mustafa's murder.