Cannes Screens Film on 1915 Massacres of Armenians
Transitions on Line (Czech Republic) - May 21-27, 2002

One of the most contentious subjects in modern Caucasian history reached film screens last week when, on 20 May, a
film about the 1915 massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was shown at the Cannes film festival.

The film Ararat, directed by Atom Egoyan--an Egyptian-born Canadian-Armenian filmmaker famous for films such as The Sweet Hereafter, Exotica, Felicia's Journey, Calendar, and The Adjuster--follows the efforts of a well-known Armenian director to make a film in Turkey about the siege of Van, which precipitated the massacres of Armenians in 1915. The director is played by the French-Armenian singer and actor Charles Aznavour (or Chahnour Varinag Aznavourian), whose parents fled to France to escape the slaughter.

Through juxtapositions of past and present and intertwined story lines, the film explores the effects of making the movie on Aznavour's character and how the massacres have rippled down through the generations of the Armenian diaspora in North America, disturbing and leaving their mark on personal lives. If the mixed time frames are designed to show continuities, the film-within-a-film motif is also a message--that "creativity is a means of transcending trauma," as Egoyan puts it.

Egoyan did not intend the film to be a political diatribe, RFE/RL reports him as saying, but instead wanted "to make the film universal so that anyone can watch it." However, ahead of its expected general release in Armenia in the autumn, it is the film's political dimension that is currently making news there and in Turkey.

Despite Egoyan's assertion, as reported by BBS News Online, that the film is not meant to demonize present-day Turks, Turkey's reaction has been immediate and loud. On 22 May, two days after the film's showing in Cannes, Turkey's culture minister, Istemihan Talay, branded the film `propaganda' that distorted history and called it an `aggressive' film that would hurt relations between Armenians and Turks. Several civic groups have threatened to boycott Miramax, the film's distributor, and Walt Disney Co., which produced the film.

Turkey denies that 1.5 million Armenians were killed, saying the figures are exaggerated, and argues that the Armenians died during civil unrest rather than in a state-organized genocide. On occasion, Turkish officials have also contested the word massacre. In early 2001, the Hulton Getty picture library withdrew three famous photographs of slaughtered Armenians from its website after a Turkish Embassy official in London objected to a caption saying that the dead
were victims of Turkish massacres. He asserted that the dead, who had been held in camps in the Syrian desert, had `starved' to death.

Another reason for the furious reaction within Turkey may be the growing number of countries that have begun to accept the Armenian view that the killings were genocide. France did so officially last year, and it has been joined by states such as Russia, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, and Lebanon. Similarly, the European parliament has passed a motion condemning the killings as genocide, while the Labour government in Britain--after initially excluding the Armenian massacres--added commemorations of the 1915 slaughter to its newly instituted Holocaust Day.

The Armenian-American lobby has also recently been putting pressure on President George W. Bush to use the word `genocide.' However, on 24 April, in a statement to mark the 87th anniversary of the massacres, Bush remained with the terminology `massacre' and `murder.'

Turkey has been responded strongly to the word `genocide' in recent years. When, in October 2000, a Republican congressman proposed a nonbinding Congressional resolution condemning the `genocide,' the Turkish government threatened to close NATO bases, hinder surveillance flights over Iraq, and block oil and arms deals. The motion was blocked. After France's President Jacques Chirac approved a bill labeling the deaths as `genocide' on 30 January 2001, Turkey canceled, among others, a $205 million deal to upgrade 80 Turkish military aircraft; the foreign minister called the French measure `post-modern fascism, anti-Muslim and anti-Turkish.'

The question of the appropriate designation for the wholesale killing in the dying days of the Ottoman empire has also been echoed in relations with Azerbaijan and Israel this year. In February, the Israeli ambassador in Yerevan unleashed a flurry of diplomatic notes after he called the 1915 killings "merely a tragedy" that could not be compared to the Holocaust. For its part, Azerbaijan has called for the international community to recognize the killing of 613 Azeris in
the Nagorno-Karabakh village of Khodjaly as an act of genocide, with Azeri President Heidar Aliev describing the Khodjaly events in Bakinskii Rabochi as the "the bloodiest page in the policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide regularly perpetrated by Armenian chauvinists."

--by Anna Hakobyan