"The Physician" glorifies Persian Islamic progressive era

Nov 8, 2012

Entertainment

Ben Kingsley as Persian scientist philosopher Ibn Sina in The Physician

The Hollywood Reporter calls the new movie - that captures the life of legendary Persian scientist philosopher Ibn Sina - the antithesis of the propaganda hate film Innocence of Muslims. The Phyiscian made its pitch to the U.S. market at AFM, American Film Market, which ended on Tuesday in Santa Monica.

Instead of portraying Islam as a force of extremism and oppression, the movie offers a look at the religion at a point in history — the 11th century — when Muslims, and particularly Iranians, were on the cutting edge of science, culture and religious tolerance. "You have to remember, what we in the West call the Dark Ages was, simultaneously, the Golden Age of Islamic science, art, astrology, astronomy, physics, chemistry and medicine," says Ben Kingsley, who acts as the legendary Persian scientist philosopher Ibn Sina in The Physician, an adaptation of the 1987 best-seller book by American writer Noah Gordon. Although the book is a fiction, it is based on the life of Ibn Sina, the Persian polymath known in the West as Avicenna.

Ibn Sina (Avicenna)

“I was speaking to an Iranian woman I worked with briefly, and she said: ‘You’re playing Ibn Sina! We love him! He is a national hero in Iran, we have monuments to him!’ ” Kingsley tells The Hollywood Reporter during a break in shooting at MMC Studios in Cologne, Germany. “She told me her mother, living in Tehran, is going to send me a book on him.”

The film is a sort of pilgrim’s progress: Young Englishman Rob Cole (British actor Tom Payne) is both blessed and cursed with the ability to sense when someone is about to die. He tries to study medicine, but medieval England is a backwater of religious quacks and superstition. Hearing of a gifted physician and teacher in faraway Persia, he sets off, traveling from his English purgatory to the promised land and to the tutelage of the Persian philosopher and scientist Ibn Sina. Ibn Sina wrote a scientific encyclopedia, The Book of Healing, that was a standard medical text across the Middle East and Europe well into the 17th century.

The movie is budgeted at $35 million, with a cast that includes not only Oscar winner Kingsley but also Stellan Skarsgard (The Avengers), Olivier Martinez (Unfaithful) and rising German star Elyas M’Barek (The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones). Physician’s producer, German mini-major UFA Cinema, specializes in historic drama, usually of the small-screen variety. Its recent credits include the BAFTA-nominated World War II television documentary The Sinking of the Laconia.

"The Physician" movie set (click to enlarge)

The film’s director, Philipp Stoelzl, has made a name for himself with the German-language period movies North Face (2008) and Young Goethe in Love (2010), which managed to combine historical accuracy with local box-office success. Stoelzl’s English-language debut was The Expatriate, an action thriller starring Aaron Eckhart and Olga Kurylenko that premiered in 2011 at the American Film Market. But Physician, which Beta Cinema is shopping to buyers at the 2012 AFM, is his real international calling card.

On Physician, Stoelzl offers a near-obsessive focus on visual aesthetics — hence the clouds of frankincense on set — and with extensive location work. The director shot exteriors for the film in Morocco and in Eastern Germany, in one of the last 11th century castles still standing. Visual effects are coming from Pixomondo, Oscar winners for Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and the VFX team behind Game of Thrones.

That desire for authenticity led to a yearlong delay in production when the Arab Spring uprising put plans for a 2011 shoot in Morocco on hold. “We couldn’t find a single insurance company that would cover us — it was too hot,” says Wolf Bauer, one of the film’s producers.

UFA and Stoelzl finally completed the Physician shoot — on budget — but the film remains a gamble. Gordon’s novel was a best-seller in Europe — Beta presold the film to Germany, Spain and Poland as well as Latin America in Cannes in May — but is largely unknown in the U.S. and U.K.

Physician’s religious-themed subplot also could prove controversial. Western audiences might not appreciate being depicted as the barbarians to Sina’s enlightened Persia, and religious fundamentalism of all sorts — Islamic, Jewish or Christian — doesn’t come off well in Stolzl’s telling of the tale. And despite the cachet of the supporting cast — with Hollywood regulars Kingsley and Skarsgard — the lead, Payne, is an unknown factor at the box office. His biggest role to date was as a supporting player in the HBO series Luck.

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