EGOYAN MOVIE REAPS CANNES CONTROVERSY: Atom Egoyan and his wife, the actress Arsinée Khanjian, pose at a photo call in Cannes yesterday. That was the easy part of their day -- after the showing of Egoyan's Ararat, about the early-century massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, reporters from around the world peppered the Canadian director with aggressive queries about his politics.

Bruce Greenwood, Charles Aznavour and Eric Bogosian appear in Ararat, which is stirring up controversy at the film festival in Cannes. Alliance Atlantis, The Canadian Press.

CANNES - Critics commandeered the premiere of Atom Egoyan's new movie yesterday by bombarding him with questions about its political intent rather than its artistic nature.

It was in an attempt to sidestep such scrutiny that, when Egoyan accepted the invitation to premiere Ararat at this year's Festival de Cannes, he chose to do so as an out-of-competition entry and away from any political agenda of the jury. It is a film that deals with a politically sensitive time: the period 1915 to 1923, when Armenians say some 1.5 million of their people were slaughtered by Ottoman Turks.

"I know exactly the types of pressures and gossip and rumours and the process that one goes through, and I did not want to expose this film to that," the Toronto director said.

"I wanted this film to somehow be apart from all of that. Because of the nature of the film, because of the nature of the decisions the film deals with, it just didn't seem right."

Egoyan and some of his cast -- Arsinée Khanjian, Charles Aznavour, Elias Koteas, David Alpay, Marie-Josée Croze, Simon Abkarian -- faced repeated questions at yesterday's press conference about the political issues the film uses as a context for discussing very human issues about responsibility and acceptance -- questions that didn't actually ask about the film itself.

"It's obvious this film has been shot from an Armenian perspective, and Turks are portrayed as bloodthirsty and evil," one BBC reporter said, prefacing her question. "How would you compare Armenian actions in the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia? Can you compare Israel and Palestinians with actions of the Ottoman Empire and Armenians?"

At this point, about 25 minutes into the interview session, Egoyan had had enough and interrupted the reporter. "I'm sorry," he said. "This is not about the film. We don't want to talk about these issues."

The killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks was an atrocity that Hitler cited 25 years later in order to convince his generals they could get away with exterminating the Jews. No one remembered the Armenians, after all. Even today, the Turkish government refuses to admit the deaths were anything more than a result of the natural course of the First World War and not a systematic extermination of a population.

But Egoyan had never set out to make a historical drama about the genocide, definitive or otherwise. "It's about living with the ghosts of history," he says of the theme of the film. And while historically accurate depictions of those atrocities are in Ararat, they're within the context of a film being made in Toronto in the present day.

So when a Turkish film critic, describing himself as "one of the very few bad guys in this room," asked early on whether Egoyan thought Ararat might help establish a better relationship between Armenians and Turks, it set an uneasy tone for the rest of the press conference.

"This is not a film that is trying to in any way demonize a present-day Turk," Egoyan responded. "It's the opposite. What I'm trying to do is ask the viewer to consider what it means to pass judgment on somebody who's alive today for things that were done for good or for evil by people who are no longer around."

"That is a very pertinent question in an another sort of reality," added Khanjian. "What is supposed to happen between Turkey and Armenia today is of absolute geopolitical relevance, of immediate urgent relevance for both countries. But we're not talking about the film, it seems, at this point."

In fact, there would be so little discussion of the film itself that Khanjian, an Armenian Canadian, felt the need to remind everybody that the events explored in Ararat are not a work of fiction. "The Armenian genocide happened," she said. "The film does not deal in any way with the political confirmation of the fact that the Armenian genocide occurred. There is not even the slightest concern in the film about that process."

Instead the film focuses on Raffi, a young Armenian-Canadian played by newcomer Alpay, who works on a film crew and is trying to deal with this part of his heritage, including the death of his father, an Armenian freedom fighter who was killed trying to assassinate a Turkish diplomat.

"The issue," said Egoyan, trying to direct the conversation away from politics and toward the personal, "is how these events, how any events, can be transmitted through generations. How those things persist and how you bring those things into the conversations you have with your children, the legacies you impart."

This has particular importance in the relationship between Christopher Plummer's customs officer, who listens to Raffi tell the story of the genocide, and his gay son and his son's companion, played by Koteas. It's a relationship Plummer's character finds offensive. That Koteas also happens to have a part as a sadistic Turkish officer in the film Alpay is working on adds another layer of complexity to the story, another level for the characters to explore.

"The chain of storytelling is about to be fractured" in Plummer's family, Egoyan explained. "We are dependent, as a society, on collective memory, the storytelling we encounter from parents to children we are dependent on."

As Raffi tells the customs officer about his heritage, Egoyan said Raffi "empowers himself" through exploring an aspect of his own history he never really understood.

"Telling it to a stranger, who because of a certain juncture in his own life is receptive," Egoyan said, helps Raffi see the value in his heritage while allowing both him and the customs officer to tacitly acknowledge their histories. "It's the emotional lynchpin of the film."

In the end, politics and emotions aside, Khanjian says Ararat is a Canadian film about Canadian experiences, albeit of people of Armenian-Canadian descent.

It's about "the history of generations, the conflicts of generations, and I do not look at the film as something pertinent only to my identity," she said.

Egoyan added that it's a testament to how "powerful a force art can be in dealing with trauma, and how creativity is a means of being able to transcend trauma."

National Post article