Cannes critics grill Egoyan on Ararat
Times Colonist (Victoria) - May 22, 2002

Critics at the Cannes film festival bombarded director Atom Egoyan with questions about his latest movie's political intent as Ararat made its festival debut Monday night.

"This is not about the film," the frustrated director said as he was questioned on everything from the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.

He insisted that the film is about "living with the ghosts of history. It's about the making of a movie on the genocide in Armenia and how it affects present-day Armenians, but it is not an attack on Turkey." The movie focuses on a young Armenian-Canadian named Rafi, played by newcomer David Alpay, who is part of the film crew making a movie about the slaughter of Armenians by Turks during the First World War. When asked by a journalist who identified himself as a
Turk about the issues the film will raise in Turkey, Egoyan replied: "This is not a film that is trying to, in any way, demonize present day Turks. In fact, it is the opposite. What I am trying to do is ask the viewer to consider what it means to pass judgment on somebody who is alive today for things that were done, for good or for evil, by people who are no longer around."

The film has stirred controversy because Turkey disputes the central premise of Ararat, specifically that it was responsible for the genocide of more than one million Armenians almost 90 years ago.

While the Turkish government acknowledges that many Armenians died around the time the First World War began, they claim the number killed by what was then its crumbling Ottoman government was not as high as the Armenians say and that many died from disease, illness, famine and exposure.

Egoyan, who directed and wrote the movie, is unmoved by the Turkish government's protests over the veracity of what it shows. "The events that the film depicts have been completely substantiated," he said after a press screening of Ararat.

The film drifts between the scenes and characters on the movie set -- which uses Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey as a backdrop -- and the lives of people in modern Toronto who either act in or have some connection to the fictional movie.

One of the themes revolves around story telling and how history is remembered, something that Egoyan identified as an important piece of what he was trying to accomplish.

"We are dependent as a society on collective memory," he said.

"The story telling that we encounter, from parents to children, from those children to their children, is essential to who we become."

Times Colonist news services
Times Colonist (Victoria)