Ararat Details

Even in a world seemingly inured to atrocity, how can the crime of genocide be so easily forgotten? That's the question posed by this angry diatribe against the actions of Turkey, which, in 1915, slaughtered over a million of its ethnic Armenian population. Turkey has never apologised and — until now — the world has overlooked the tragedy. It's brought to our attention here by Canada's most respected writer/director, Atom Egoyan (who is of Armenian descent). Beginning with a film-maker's attempt to shoot a movie about the massacre in Turkey, Egoyan fashions a complex story that flashes back and forth in time, revealing the events leading up to the slaughter and its impact on subsequent generations. The movie-within-a-movie storyline has a real morbid grip, and utilises some horrifyingly effective imagery, but the labyrinthine plot tends to diminish our emotional response to the outrage, as we are constantly distanced from the event by the convoluted chronology of the piece.

"...Egoyan creates a dense system of poetic correspondence by editing across time frames, and the impression one has of archetypes echoing through the ages is irresistibly poignant..."