The 27th Toronto International Film Festival opens tonight with the most politically charged film ever plunked down in the prestigious first-night gala slot at Roy Thomson Hall.

The film is from Toronto's pre-eminent arthouse director, Atom Egoyan. The film is Ararat, an intensely personal if complex cultural journey, both for Egoyan and his actress-wife Arsinee Khanjian, who co-stars in the large ensemble. And the film, which raises profound issues about the history of the Armenian genocide at the hand of the Turks 85 years ago, during World War I, is hugely controversial.

It has been ever since it made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

"The thing that I wasn't prepared for," Egoyan tells The Sun, "was the way in which, the moment you deal with any sort of political issue, that supersedes the artistic statement of the film, the humanistic element of the film.

"It is very fascinating to me how that becomes the agenda, but in a way that's monolithic and quite surprising to me."

And very troublesome, too. Ararat has been wrongly described as "a film about the Armenian genocide." It is much more complicated than that, although the question of the genocide is certainly covered, and forcefully so, with tremendous respect to the legacy of that tragedy, which resulted in the deaths of as many as 1.5 million people.

As usual in Egoyan's world, however, Ararat is not a straight narrative, not a historical drama. Instead, it is set in contemporary Toronto. Many key characters are of Armenian heritage, as are Egoyan and Khanjian. One man is a Turkish-Canadian. The film explores the question of cultural memory and the responsiblity of individuals to either remember or to forgive and forget.

The genocide itself is depicted in a sometimes lurid, often melodramatic film-within-the-film which we see being shot in Toronto. Egoyan never expected that his depiction, especially in the film-within-the-film, would be read so literally, without irony, without the kind of debate that opens up human issues, not closes them down.

"What has happened with Ararat is that you can have an entire discussion about the movie by talking only about politics and never talking about the characters, really, and what the characters do," Egoyan says

Khanjian is less surprised, although resentful of how some Turkish politicians and many media tried to distort the themes of the film before and during Cannes.

"I was much more suspicious," she says in a joint interview with Egoyan. "I had a premonition that a lot of political action was going to be taken, especially because of what we have seen earlier around any attempt to make a film about the Armenian genocide."

Egoyan and Khanjian are dedicated to bringing the historical facts of the genocide to light. Unlike the Holocaust, or even Pol Pot's killing fields of Cambodia, the Armenian genocide is little discussed, and not at all in Turkey.

"To bury history," says Khanjian, "is to dehumanize. Remembering the past is about the health of the mind. We need to remember in order to exist in the present and in order to understand the future."

Says Egoyan: "This film is about the denial of that history. It is not about the event as much as it is about the denial of the event. This is why we're so excited about Toronto -- and what was so completely lost in Cannes.

"I think the perception here (because of Cannes) has been that this movie is about the Armenian genocide, about something happening 85 years ago. No, it's about living in Toronto right now and dealing with your own history."

http://www.canoe.ca/TorontoShowbiz/ts.ts-09-05-0081.html