Silk

Based on the number one international bestselling novel by Alessandro Baricco, Silk is a sweeping romantic drama woven around a material of ethereal fragility: silkworm eggs. When the pébrine epidemic--the spotted silkworm disease that ravaged eggs from European hatcheries in the 1860s--spread overseas, eggs from as far away as Africa and India became infected; thus, the entire European silk trade seemed doomed. To continue his lucrative trade, Baldabiou--a roguish French trader--decides to send young military officer Herve Joncour on a perilous mission to Japan, separating Herve for months on end from Helene, his lovely and devoted schoolteacher wife. Prior to the opening of the Suez Canal, Japan produced the finest silk in the world for thousands of years and was considered a dominion forbidden to foreigners--quite literally the opposite end of the world. It is here that Herve encounters the powerful and feared local baron, Hara Jubei, with whom he will trade for the precious silkworm eggs. And it is here, in a world unlike anything that Herve has experienced before, that he becomes entranced by the baron's concubine, a deeply mysterious girl of intoxicating beauty. Without speaking one another's language, they share a doomed, obsessive love. A film of painterly beauty and ravishing romance, Silk is a historically rapturous epic romance of east meets west.