THE TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL
September 5, 2002

Egoyan's Ararat leaves few on the fence

The carpet was rolled out at Roy Thomson Hall Thursday night for the gala opening of the 27th Toronto International Film Festival. It was bright red and tastefully embroidered with the gold logo of a French champagne company.

Not that the well-shod feet gliding into the downtown concert venue for the North American premiere of homeboy Atom Egoyan's controversial new Ararat would have noticed. Toronto did not get to become what is generally considered the world's most prestigious film fest after Cannes on the strength of programming taste and Canadian manners alone. Everything has a sponsor.

Festivals cost money. Especially festivals in large urban centres that screen 350 films from 50 countries over 11 intensive days and nights. Without corporate help from car manufacturers, communication giants, wineries and lollipop makers, an event also known as the largest of its kind in the world would never gas up and lumber down the runway, let alone take off and fly.

The festival transforms this city in September. Hotels and restaurants are full. Caterers and stretch limo operators work graveyard shifts. Its epicentre, at Bay and Bloor, pulses with the activity of perennially agitated movie-industry players from America and around the world, frantically buying and selling dreams, pushing products and personalities, grabbing for their quarter-hour of fame, fortune and creative validation.

Inside headquarters at the Four Seasons Hotel, harassed public relations people juggle the impossible task of coordinating thousands of interviews between artists and members of the media - never cozy bedmates at the best of times and positively estranged when both are necessarily being treated like statistics. This year, those stats include names like Sophia Loren, Pierce Brosnan, Cate Blanchett, Matt Dillon, John Cusack, Holly Hunter, Hilary Swank, Kevin Kline, Julianne Moore and Sigourney Weaver, to name a few passing through between now and Sept. 14. Tension comes with the territory. Out in the real world, tickets to the packed public screenings are almost impossible to find, and long lines form for screenings, bathrooms, food and coffee. Lines form for lines. The good news is those lines are breeding grounds for buzz about which movies are masterpieces and which are pretentious rubbish. So far, word is impassioned for movies as wildly varied as Alexandr Sokurov's Russian Ark, which consists of one continuous 96-minute Steadicam take through the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg; a sexually explicit new slice of lowlife called Ken Park by Larry Clark (Kids, Bully); and the unlikely romantic pairing of Adam Sandler and Emily Watson in P.T. Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love.

Word about Egoyan's emotionally complex exploration of the Armenian genocide in 1915 has stirred its own passions. At the huge opening-night party generously thrown by Astral Media at the old CNE grounds, people lined up to praise or damn it, (and will do so again when it comes to Montreal for the Festival of New Cinema and New Media, Oct. 10 to 20). Few sat on the fence. Ararat is not that kind of movie.

"I wish someone had already made a simple movie dealing with the slaughter of the Armenian people by the Turkish government during World War I," Egoyan said earlier in the evening, during a civilized Astral pre-gala cocktail on a terrace by a reflecting pool at Roy Thomson Hall. "It would have made my job easier."

The point of Ararat is, of course, that no one has made that movie, and the long international silence over the loss of one million innocent women, children and men is one of the great stains upon a century full of them. It is not expected to play well in Turkey, where the government has defended Egoyan's work from an artistic point of view, but let other groups condemn it as biased, historical claptrap. Egoyan is of Armenian descent, they claim. How could he make an even-handed film about such a subject?

For actor Bruce Greenwood, however, who plays an American doctor whose eyewitness account of events at the time are the foundation for Ararat, no such ambivalence exists. "Before I made the film the term 'Armenian genocide' existed only in the dustiest recesses of my mind," said Greenwood, a longtime Egoyan ensemble player and the acclaimed star of last year's Thirteen Days. "Then Atom suggested I read Clarence Usher's 1917 book An American Physician in Turkey. That was the beginning of my education.

"I don't know why it was kept quiet for so long. Perhaps there's only so much historical misery we're capable of handling. As germane as it is in today's world to be reminded of how brutal we can be to one another, it's still hard to reach into the bag of snakes that is our history."

Personal Appearances