Inspired by Bernard de Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, Around the Sun directed by Oliver Krimpas, and starring Cara Theobold (Downton Abbey) along with Gethin Anthony (Game of Thrones) is now making the regional festival rounds. The film is playing at the young upstart Mystic Film Festival, in Connecticut, this weekend, and at the the Heartland International Film Festival, in Indianapolis next weekend.
Bernard (Gethin Anthony), a film location scout, tours a repossessed and crumbling French château. Over the course of an afternoon, he falls for both the place and its owner’s flirtatious representative, Maggie (Cara Theobold), who recounts the story of an influential popular-science book written and set there. But is their present-tense connection for real, or just a projection of the book’s 17th-century characters?