 ARARAT MOVIE ON DVD
Ararat is a story about truth and denial on both an intimate and a grand scale. The estranged members of a contemporary Armenian family are faced both with Turkey's denial of their catastrophic past and with their own complicated present: A mother who only wants peace, a young woman who wants nothing but retribution, and a young man whose
journey to uncover his roots is jeopardizing his future. Told in Egoyan's trademark elliptical style,
Ararat is at once a mysterious and powerful story about determining truth.
DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHT BY ATOM EGOYAN
"My original impulse was to tell a straightforward historical story," says The Sweet Hereafter's Atom Egoyan, whose new film Ararat tells the story of the Armenian genocide of 1915, in which well over a million people
- two thirds of Armenia's population - were murdered by the Turks.
"But I'd have to show extreme scenes of unspeakable horror, and as a filmmaker, I can't do that without a degree of self-consciousness.
In the end, I want the film to be about the stories parents tell their children, how small moments of misunderstanding create huge generational riffs."
Ararat, set in the present day, tells the story through an Armenian family working with a film crew to make a picture about the war, and is the Oscar-nominated director's most personal film: Much of Egoyan's family was lost in the massacre, and his son is named after one of the picture's true-life protagonists, painter Arshile Gorky.
"You want people to know what happened, but also what continues to happen," Egoyan says, stressing how many Turks still deny that the war took place.
"When I told my son about the genocide, he asked if the Turks said they were sorry. If you tell him the truth, the trauma gets passed on. I want to create a fantasy of how that cycle might be broken
- the healing which can occur when someone invests themselves in someone else's history in an emotional, responsible way."
Atom Egoyan
ARARAT MOVIE REVIEW
This remarkable, intricate movie from Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter) centers around the making of a film about the genocide of Armenians in Turkey in 1915 - but this is not a dry, didactic historical re-enactment.
Ararat unspools multiple storylines around Ani (Arsinee Khanjian), an art historian hired as a consultant on the film; her son Raffi (David Alpay); his stepsister, with whom Raffi is in love even though she believes that his mother is responsible for her father's suicide; an actor (Elias Koteas) hired to play the Turkish officer who organized the genocide; and a customs officer (Christopher Plummer), who holds Raffi for questioning under suspicion of smuggling heroin. All these characters, combined with the movie within the movie, intertwine in a complex yet powerfully emotional examination of memory (both cultural and personal), loyalty (to one's family, to one's heritage), creativity, and the subjectivity of truth. Bret Fetzer
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PHOTO ALBUM
David Alpay and
Arsinee Khanjian
Christopher Plummer
David Alpay
Arsinee Khanjian and
Charles Aznavour
Director Atom Egoyan with
David Alpay on the set
Photos - 2002
Miramax Films
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