Sir Ian McKellen is famous worldwide for his roles as Magneto in the X-Men films, Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings trilogy; and has wowed audiences in his many Shakespeare roles.
Now Sir Ian is starring as the Ghost in Ken McMullen’s Hamlet Revenant.
The part-documentary feature, launched on May 21 at Cannes Film Festival, investigates the mythology around the Shakespeare play.
Originally called Hamlet Within, the film is a radical cinematic investigation of the myth of Hamlet, its origins, and its universal appeal across cultures and belief systems. The eternal struggle between the instincts of life and death within us is central to Shakespeare’s tragedies and is particularly poignant in Hamlet.
This film essay takes as its central character the Ghost and reveals the unconscious impulses inherent to the human experience. As the ghost returns, it exposes a space occupied by our physical existence and that of the unconscious in our collective memory.
The Art Cinema and Scape Films co-production will be released as an NFT collection on the newly formed eco-platform Cineverse. The Web3 movie distribution platform, Cineverse, enables filmmakers, distributors, and producers to market films directly on their platform. Here movies can be shared, sold, gifted, and resold in minutes, giving owners total access to resale rights.
Hamlet Revenant will feature the likes of Sir Ian McKellen, John Shrapnel, Lex Shrapnel, Ben Turner, Gabriella Wright, Anne Sophie Refskou, Richard Wilson and Jacques Derrida.
Art Cinema, the female-led collective of storytellers, content creators and visual media producers founded in 2017 by Gisele Phillips, also released its production, a feature film entitled Head Of State. Written and directed by Ken McMullen. The film is set in the age of the English civil war and was screened Saturday, May 21.