NEVER LET ME GO - Challenges Ethics on Human Cloning

Ayala Cinemas exclusively offers another multi-Award winning film starting March 2 - from 20th Century Fox Searchlight, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan star in the dystopian drama “Never Let Me Go” based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel of the same title.

Directed by Mark Romanek, “Never Let Me Go” tells of friends who are caught in a triangle of friendship, love and betrayal under scientific circumstances wherein they are clones meant to provide organs to severely ill patients. Their characters, Kathy (Mulligan), Tommy (Garfield) and Ruth (Knightley) all grew up together in a remotely idyllic English private school known as Hailsham. Tommy, being emotionally fragile goes with Ruth’s passionate advances to keep him from Kathy, whom Tommy is truly in love with. Tommy and Ruth’s relationship took a toll on their friendship as Kathy silently eased from their company.

Freeing herself from the web of jealousy and betrayal, Kathy decides to become a “carer” – a clone who is temporarily given a reprieve from donation to support and comfort clones who have started to donate their organs. Working as a carer 10 years after, Kathy learns that Tommy and Ruth have split up and decided to reconcile with the two. Finding Tommy, now weak due to a series of organ donation, shows Kathy his drawings hoping that his art will grant them deferral to stop being donors from a woman called Madame. The two heads to the art gallery that the Madame owns, but tells them that there has not been any deferral granted in the past and that there would not be any in the future. The gallery, according to Madame, was created to challenge the ethics of the creation of organ donors and to see if clones have souls.

As Kathy has yet to start her donation, she contemplates on her own mortality. Remembering the many clones she has cared for gradually die as each organ is donated, she now questions if her fate should be any different from the life they have been molded.

Kathy, played by Carey Mulligan narrates in the film and relates that she had already read the novel before the film’s casting. “My mum is a big Ishiguro fan, and I read it pretty much as soon as it came out, because she said I should read it and I loved it. I thought if they made a film, it’s in the book she’s 31 at the end, so I thought that was a couple of years away. Then they brought the ages down and made it so we could play them from ages 18 to 28. But I love the book, I was always in love with the book,” recalls Mulligan.

Director Romanek shares that he originally was having difficulty finding the right actress to play Kathy and a tight filming deadline loomed prior to Mulligan's casting. Meanwhile, Peter Rice, Fox Searchlight’s finance executive, was watching “An Education” at the Sundance Film Festival wrote Romanek a four word text message, which read verbatim "Hire the genius Mulligan. When later asked why the message was so abrupt, he explained that he was still in the middle of viewing the film. Rice exhibited what was described as a "rare foresight" in greenlighting a film with an almost unknown lead actress.

Check out www.sureseats.com for the film’s schedule.