Land of enlightenment

A biopic about Charles Darwin is playing at the Toronto Film Festival, and has openings set everywhere except the Muslim world, whose denizens are too fraught with religious prejudice and inferior education for the prospect of a Darwin movie to excite distributors.

Oh, wait:

The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as "a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder". His "half-baked theory" directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to "atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering", the site stated.

The film has sparked fierce debate on US Christian websites, with a typical comment dismissing evolution as "a silly theory with a serious lack of evidence to support it despite over a century of trying".

I'm not entirely thrilled about a flick that could imply that Darwin's theory was motivated by grief-inspired atheism, but good heavens.