Idris Elba & Tilda Swinton Star In 'Three Thousand Years of Longing'

Some fairy tales never go out of style; the same story is merely retold in modern settings. These parables usually reflect a moral code that's stood the test of civilizations — Beauty and the Beast's admonishment to look beyond the surface of a person's appearance, Cinderella's proof that being a good person will lead to happiness. The Genie of the Lamp is another one, the "be careful what you wish for" story of lives ruined because of heedless desire fulfillment. The new film, Three Thousand Years of Longing, is the latest adaptation of that Middle Eastern tale and is heading to U.S. theaters after its debut at Cannes.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is based on a modernized version of the famous story from 1001 Arabian Nights, the titular novella from the 1995 short story collection The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye by A.S.Byatt. Byatt, the pen name of Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, one of the greatest modern English writers of our time, her Possession: A Romance won the 1990 Booker Prize, and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye helped secure her DBE for services to literature. The novella is both a fairy tale trope and a deconstruction of the mythological and moral underpinnings of the story, with some Shakespeare and Chaucer tossed in for good measure.

As retold, it features a genius literary scholar who accidentally comes across a dusty bottle in an Istanbul bazaar, discovering a genie inside hellbent on granting her three wishes. Gillian Perholt is a middle-aged  narratologist — someone who studies the narrative structure of literature — and her deep understanding of these myths and her conversations with the genie suggest can work together to sidestep the usual pitfalls of wish-granting. But though Perholt believes she has outsmarted her own fairy tale's natural ending, it is not as easy as she thought.