Competition: “Adoration” by Atom Egoyan

With the in-Competition presentation of Adoration, director Atom Egoyan returns to the Festival de Cannes where he was a member of the Official Selection Jury in 1996 and winner of the Grand Prix for The Sweet Hereafter in 1997. The Canadian director, born in Egypt to Armenian parents, also premiered Exotica on the Croisette in 1994, Felicia’s Journey in 1999, and Where the Truth Lies in 2005. In Adoration, Simon, a teenager played by Devon Bostick, creates a false identity for himself on the Internet. His cyber-shenanigans make waves all over the world. The question is whether other people’s perspectives on his past can help Simon make peace with himself.

Atom Egoyan’s twelfth feature expands on themes which occur in many of his films: the differences between appearance and reality, the subjective nature of truth, the fragmentation of narrative, multiple points of view, complex characters, and the subterranean bonds which make up a family. In this film, he focuses more specifically on our relationship to information media and technology, and their impact on the structure of our identity and our privacy.

The inspiration for Adoration came in part from an article Egoyan read, about an event that was in the news in 1986. A Jordanian terrorist had put his pregnant Irish girlfriend aboard an El Al flight, with a bomb hidden in her carry-on luggage. She did not know it was there until airline security discovered it. “The story struck me because it was one of the first examples of how extreme a terrorist act could be,” Egoyan writes. “and how one could turn someone close into an abstraction – not only his fiancée, but also an unborn child. I came across the story again in 2006 and began to wonder about the child and the legacy of being raised knowing what your father had done.”