Agora, the story of Hypatia

[Mariposa (Amalia)]

Have anybody seem this movie yet?

It shows the last days of astronomer and phylosopher Hypatia, a woman of great bauty and intellect who taugh at the Alexandria library. She died in the hands of a Christian mob, who saw her beliefs and scientific findings as a menace for the Chirstian credo. She was brutally murdered soon before the destruction of the Alexandria Library.

The destruction marked the beginning of the Dark Ages, all the knowledge of the ancient and modern world was destroyed and the world was plunged in ignorance that lasted 1000 years. Imagine all the knowledge that has been lost forever with the destruction of the famous library.....only few volumes were salvaged.

The movie is a spanish production, directed by
Alejandro Amenabar, but is English spoken with mostly British actors. The main character of Hypatia is played by actress Rachel Weisz.

The movie is in limited release in Australia.

Here is the trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTZZHPR5kEo

[beren]

Hoping to see this movie soon, been following it for a while now hoping it would get a theatre release here in Australia. First learnt about Hypatia watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos doco look forward to seeing it and it's great Rachel Weisz is in the lead role one of my favorite actresses

[GeoffW1 (Geoff)]

Hi,

Should be very interesting. The loss of Hypatia and the Great Library were tragedies which echoed for that 1000 years or more.

There was a doco recently about Heron of Alexandria, who was a mechanical engineering genius as great as Leonardo. Most of his records were lost in that destruction.

Cheers

[Octane (Humayun)]

Margaret and David reviewed this about a month ago and both were very impressed by it.

They had an interview with the director which was really quite interesting as well. He mentioned that he did the movie after he fell in love with astronomy which was not so long ago. He went somwhere remote and saw the glow of the Milky Way in the sky for the first time which piqued his interest. : )

H

[Blue Skies (Jacquie)]

I saw this the other week, made a special trek to the only cinema in town that had it on. Beautifully filmed, great costumes and an interesting look at life back then but I felt the story was a little flat (but then I'm often critical of storylines). Certainly makes you think about what could have been and how things happened back then.

[Waxing_Gibbous (Peter)]

I'm really looking forward to this.
Like Beren, I learned about her from Cosmos (actually the amount of un-taught history in Cosmos is quite amazing). Being a secret Library groupie, I've snuck into many of the world's finest collections.
Pity modern Libraries are full of self-help claptrap, cookbooks and DVDs.