Ararat premieres today (with pictures)

[wh00t]

Ararat will be shown publically for the first time today at Cannes Film Festival in France. It has been given a spot in the main theatre (Grand Théâtre Lumière) and scheduled time of showing is 7:15pm (3 1/2 hours from the time of this post).

 

See http://www.festival-cannes.com/films/fiche...id_film=3158397 for more details. Includes exerpts of dialogue.

 

http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/20020520/i/1021887970.4026589270.jpg

http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20020520/capt.1021891279.france_cannes_film_can103.jpg

http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20020520/capt.1021891259.france_cannes_film_can102.jpg

http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20020520/capt.1021891276.france_cannes_film_can104.jpg

http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/20020520/i/1021892356.4026589271.jpg

http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/20020520/i/1021892670.3623968849.jpg

http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/20020520/i/1021892591.3556851792.jpg

http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/20020520/i/1021892598.3691012178.jpg

 

[ May 20, 2002, 06:57 AM: Message edited by: wh00t ]

[15levels]

wow this is nice i want to see the movie sooo much. wonder when will it arrive in Amsterdam...

http://www.brucegreenwood.com/mov-tv/ararat.jpg

 

[ May 21, 2002, 01:48 AM: Message edited by: Rouben Malayan ]

[wh00t]

Worldwide premiere in late November, in time for Oscar consideration.

[Azat]

Film Addresses Armenian Genocide

The Associated Press

 

 

CANNES, France (AP) — In a new film at Cannes, Charles Aznavour's character eats the seeds of a pomegranate — one a day — to remind him of his mother's flight from Ottoman Turkey, when the fruit was all she had to live on.

 

In real life, Aznavour's parents fled Turkey for France to escape the killings of Armenians during World War I. The 77-year-old singer-actor, whose real name is Chahnour Varinag Aznavourian, has waited a lifetime for a compelling movie about the history of his people.

 

``Ararat,'' which opened in Cannes on Monday, is that movie, he says. The film by Atom Egoyan, best known for ``The Sweet Hereafter,'' jumps between fact and fiction, past and present.

 

Armenians claim that some 1.5 million people were killed in 1915 as part of a campaign of genocide aimed at forcing the Armenian population from the east of Turkey. Turkey says there was no systematic campaign of slaughter and that many Armenians fled during the war and the civil unrest that followed.

 

The movie's inclusion in Cannes has caused an outcry in Turkey, and several groups have petitioned and threatened to boycott Miramax, which released the film, and its parent company, the Walt Disney Co.

 

For Egoyan, a Canadian of Armenian origin, the movie was a labor of love. It also had special meaning for many of its stars, including actors Eric Bogosian and Arsinee Khanjian, who are of Armenian origin.

 

Few people outside the Armenian community know much about the killings, and Egoyan hopes the movie will change that. One character in the film points out that Adolf Hitler saw the slaughter as proof he could get away with the Final Solution, because ``nobody remembered the extermination of the Armenians.''

 

The movie leaps between 1915 Turkey and present-day Canada, and with a complex web of characters whose ties are not apparent from the beginning.

 

Aznavour plays a director making a movie about the genocide. The film within a film is the starting point for telling that story, and for showing how history affects two Canadian families.

 

Most of the characters are struggling to come to terms with the loss of loved ones and are looking to the past for answers.

 

Khanjian, Egoyan's partner in life, plays Ani, an art historian who has lived through the death of two husbands and is struggling in her relationship with her teen-age son.

 

She has written a book about an early 20th century Armenian painter, Arshile Gorky. In beautiful, emotional flashbacks, we see Gorky as he paints a portrait of his mother, who died of starvation during forced marches.

 

Ani's son, Raffi, is helping out on the movie set and goes to Turkey to film the deserted, ruined villages and churches of his ancestors. David Alpay, a tousle-haired 20-year-old Canadian pre-med student with no acting experience, gives an impressive and soulful performance as Raffi.

 

Then there's Christopher Plummer, who plays a customs agent at the airport who intercepts Raffi on his way home from Turkey, suspicious that he might be smuggling drugs.

 

Other characters include a Turkish-Canadian actor who struggles with his conscience to play the role of an evil Turkish official; a pushy, fast-talking screenwriter (Bogosian); and a deeply troubled teen-age girl who attacks a museum painting with a knife.

 

If it sounds complicated, it is, and Egoyan said he knows that he's ``expecting a ton of the viewer.'' But the connections between the characters — and between the past in Turkey and the present in Canada — pay off in the end.

[Azat]

http://fan.aznavour.free.fr/images/cannes20021.jpg

 

http://fan.aznavour.free.fr/images/cannes20022.jpg

[Azat]

Dealing with the ghosts of genocide

Egoyan and Khanjian tell of their passion for Armenia

Richard Ouzounian

Entertainment Reporter

 

http://www.thestar.com/images/020905_genocide.jpg

 

RON BULL/TORONTO STAR

'SOMETHING WAS BEING DENIED':

Filmmaker Atom Egoyan and wife/actor

Arsinee Khanjian grew up very

differently, but came to a similar

point of dedication to sharing the

sad history of their Armenian

forebears with the world through the

movie Ararat.

 

"You look after your ghosts, and I'll look after mine."

 

Arsinée Khanjian speaks that line in Ararat, the movie by her husband, Atom Egoyan, to be screened at tonight's gala opening of the Toronto International Film Festival.

 

In the picture, she's talking to her son, but in the middle of this three-way phone conversation between Toronto and Montreal, she might just as well be addressing her real-life spouse.

 

The major subject of the film is the Armenian genocide - the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks in 1915, which the Turkish government continues to insist never happened. It's a topic Egoyan and Khanjian feel passionately about, but they came to that passion by vastly different routes.

 

Those differences went into weaving the tapestry of this complex and controversial work of art.

 

Egoyan was born in Egypt, but his parents moved to Canada when he was only 2 and settled in - of all places - Victoria, B.C. He laughs at their choice.

 

"That was a really odd decision my parents made. We were the only Armenian family around. We tried to treat Armenian as my mother tongue at home, but I wanted to be like other kids, and I spoke Canadian."

 

You can hear the wonder as Egoyan recalls how strange it was.

 

"We had no church, no school, no community centre, and yet I was still Armenian. I was aware of the genocide, but only in the vaguest way. I knew that something had befallen my people. But it remained something shadowy that I heard about."

 

The softer voice of Egoyan is replaced by Khanjian's, coming sharply to the point. There are no shadowy memories in her world.

 

"I was born in Beirut, the grandchild of genocide orphans. I spoke Armenian. I went to an Armenian school. My upbringing was self-sufficient and self-referential. That is the reality of the Middle East."

 

She pauses when asked when she first heard of the genocide. "It must have begun so soon that I wasn't even aware. History was scrupulously unfolded very early on - this sense of remembering as a social, cultural obligation. Not only something I was given, but something I had to pass on."

 

She moved to Canada at 17.

 

Meanwhile, Egoyan, then a young student at the University of Toronto, had embarked on what he called "a methodical investigation" of the genocide issue, and was horrified to discover not only the event itself, but the Turks' ongoing denial of it.

 

Around the world in the early 1980s, Armenians of Egoyan and Khanjian's generation were delving into their past, not content merely to remember and suffer in silence.

 

A wave of guerrilla activity began, with Armenian activists moving against Turkish groups and individuals, trying to get them to admit to the well-documented horrors of 1915.

 

"And then," as Egoyan recalls, "It all came to a peak. Arsinée and I met in 1984, and the next year ..." They're both silent as they recall what happened.

 

On March 12, 1985, three armed Armenians stormed the Turkish Embassy in Ottawa. A Canadian security guard was killed, the ambassador was badly wounded, and his wife and daughter were taken hostage.

 

"I still remember the two of us watching it on TV. I'll never forget it."

 

Egoyan's voice is thick with emotion. "It's something I feel very passionately about, but I come from a different place than Arsinée."

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

`If we don't actually examine something and bring it to light, then we never learn, and it all happened for no reason at all.'

 

Filmmaker Atom Egoyan

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

"It's not that anyone is saying that act in Ottawa was justified," begins Khanjian, "but it really put the Armenian genocide on the table."

 

She grows angry.

 

"Something was being denied, something was being suppressed, as though it had never existed."

 

There is a telling line from the film: "The Turkish authorities don't want to admit it happened. Why not? You'll have to ask them."

 

She explains: "The entire system of Turkey is based on certain national myths. One of them is that it is a tolerant culture. To have to publicly admit these events would be the beginning of the unravelling. They don't want to be recognized as the kind of people who would have committed those sort of acts."

 

Egoyan tackles the issue by describing a pivotal scene. One of the actors in the film-within-a-film being made about the genocide is a Turkish Canadian named Ali (Elias Koteas).

 

In the movie, he's had to play a villainous character that even Egoyan calls "the evil Turk." After the scene is done, he tries to discuss how he feels about it with the elderly Armenian directing the film, but he gets nowhere.

 

Guiltily, the director sends a young Armenian Canadian assistant to Ali's house with champagne. The Armenian is himself on a steep but rapid learning curve about the genocide, after shutting his mind to it when his father, a terrorist, was murdered.

 

The two Canadians - Turk and Armenian - discuss the issues the film has raised. Ali suggests that they drink the champagne and start all over again, because the past is past.

 

"This is so tempting to accept," admits Egoyan, "but if we don't actually examine something and bring it to light, then we never learn, and it all happened for no reason at all."

 

The young Armenian turns down the proffered champagne and continues on his quest for the truth.

 

"I put those two people together because you are at the mercy of whatever juncture someone is at in their lives when you tell them a story. History is defined by moments between individuals. Moments when we're ready to listen to someone else's story."

 

Asked if he thinks the time is right, the enthusiasm rushes back.

 

"This is the moment. Oh, definitely. This story touches on so many other issues that we are having to deal with now. It's all about how open we are to testing the tolerances of our society. It requires leaps of imagination from Turks, Armenians, Canadians ... from everyone involved."

 

More coolly, Khanjian concurs.

 

"It's an amazing opportunity to create a dialogue on how to start to talk about this issue ... assuming that there is something to discuss. The genocide still seems to be off the agenda on the Turkish side."

 

When announced at Cannes, the film drew a certain hostility from Turkey, including veiled threats.

 

"Strangely enough, I never felt fear," Egoyan says. "I never felt physically threatened."

 

He manages a laugh. "I might be really naïve about this, but I have every reason to look forward to screening it at the Istanbul Film Festival. That would be an amazing breakthrough."

 

Khanjian comments with her usual quiet steel: "Identity is a very important question." Egoyan responds with his hopeful humanity: "Memory is a strange and wonderful space."

 

Between the two of them, in many ways, lies the story of Ararat.

 

Link to the site

 

[ September 05, 2002, 11:19 PM: Message edited by: Azat ]

[Azat]

Toronto Platform for Oscar Hopefuls

Toronto Film Festival Provides Early Platform for Academy Award Contenders

 

The Associated Press

 

T O R O N T O, Sept. 5 — There's no official start date to Hollywood's awards season, but the Toronto International Film Festival is as good a place to begin as any.

 

North America's biggest film showcase, the Toronto festival has become a key launching spot for studios' major fall releases, including Academy Awards hopefuls.

 

The festival, which always begins with a movie by a Canadian filmmaker, opens Thursday night with "Ararat," from writer-director Atom Egoyan ("The Sweet Hereafter"), who draws on his Armenian heritage to tell the tale of two modern estranged families. The cast includes Christopher Plummer, Eric Bogosian and Bruce Greenwood.

 

The 27th annual festival runs through Sept. 14 and will feature 265 feature-length movies and 80 short films from 50 countries.

 

"American Beauty" premiered at Toronto in 1999 and capitalized on its solid festival buzz to become an early awards front-runner, eventually winning best picture at the Oscars.

 

Other films that have used Toronto as a springboard to awards and commercial success include "Chariots of Fire," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," "The Crying Game" and "Life Is Beautiful."

 

Big titles this year include Denzel Washington's directing debut, "Antwone Fisher," in which he co-stars as a Navy psychiatrist caring for a troubled sailor; "Frida," directed by Julie Taymor (creator of the Broadway version of "The Lion King") and starring Salma Hayek as Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, wife of Diego Rivera; "Far From Heaven," a 1950s-style melodrama about racial and sexual stereotypes starring Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid; "The Four Feathers," with Heath Ledger in the story of a 19th century British soldier out to prove his valor after he's branded a coward; and "Punch-Drunk Love," a comic romance starring Adam Sandler and Emily Watson and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson ("Magnolia").

 

The Eminem hip-hop drama "8 Mile," from director Curtis Hanson ("Wonder Boys"), will screen as a work-in-progress, a rare example of an unfinished film playing at the festival. The complete film is due in theaters this fall.

 

"Of course, we do prefer having films come here in their finished, final form. But I also honestly don't have any trouble with filmmakers using the festival in that kind of way to get reaction of critics and audiences to a film still in the works," said festival director Piers Handling.

 

Foreign-language highlights include "Talk to Her," the latest from Pedro Almodovar ("All About My Mother"); "City of God," a stark portrait of violence and drugs among youths in Rio de Janeiro; and "The Man Without a Past," the second-prize winner at last spring's Cannes Film Festival, about an amnesiac beating victim who finds romance in the slums of Helsinki.

 

On the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which disrupted last year's event, the festival will screen "11'09"01," a collection of Sept. 11-themed short films some of which have been criticized as anti-American and "The Guys," starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia in the tale of a New York City fire captain who must prepare eulogies for men killed in the attacks.

 

Unlike festivals such as Cannes and Sundance, which cater more to people in the movie business, Toronto is known as a film lover's event.

 

"This festival's great because the public gets to go, as opposed to others around the world that are mainly for press and the industry," said Sheena Nugent of Toronto, who already had bought tickets to 10 films and lined up at the festival box office Thursday morning for more.

 

Many festivalgoers try to catch obscure movies they won't find later at their local mall cinema. Nugent's choices included the spelling-bee documentary "Spellbound" and the British soccer comedy "Bend It Like Beckham."

 

"I'm not likely to see things at the festival that I might see a month from now in mainstream theaters," said Rick Hughes of Toronto, who was in line for tickets to "Flower and Garnet," a film made by a friend of his from Saskatchewan. "And I'm a little bit of a nationalist, so I lean a little toward anything Canadian."

 

On the Net:

 

Toronto Film Festival Web site: http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/2002/default.asp

[Azat]

Egoyan covers story from only one angle

 

Barrett Hooper

National Post

 

Thursday, September 05, 2002

 

ARARAT

 

Ararat is one of those controversial films that is often judged before it is even seen. It has the feel of being an important film. And to the degree that it is concerned with a horrific moment in our not-so-distant past that isn't found in most history books, it is important.

 

But the film is fairly one-sided about the nature of the Armenian genocide between 1915 and 1923 (there is one half-Turkish character who is briefly allowed to present some of the genocide deniers' arguments). It portrays the Turks as sadistic killers, and it does so in such an over-the-top way that it defeats its own purpose.

 

This is just a symptom, however, of the film's essential flaw. Egoyan, who is of Armenian decent, has wanted to make this film since he was 18 years old. It is his Schindler's List. But Ararat is not Schindler's List, as its emotional impact is diluted by a complex structure that skips us from the past to the present and a few months into the future in an attempt to provide a multi-generational perspective on the event.

 

The main story is set in present-day Toronto, where a movie about the genocide, also called Ararat, is being directed by Armenian Edward Saroyan (Charles Aznavour).

 

It's through this film within the film that Egoyan weaves his way to the past, often depicting some long-ago moment, like the torture of a child, before pulling the camera back and revealing Saroyan and his camera crew.

 

While the intent may have been to confront the malleability of history, it has the undesired effect of pulling us away from those characters and out of what might have been a powerful moment.

 

It is this need of Egoyan's to use the genocide as the context for a more sweeping exploration of the nature of truth that ultimately weakens the narrative. Egoyan has too many pots on the stove. The thoughts and feelings of each character are presented baldly, and often too forcefully, as though to hit the audience over the head.

 

You can see Egoyan stretching to convey the pain and suffering the genocide has caused, but he ultimately comes up short. Rating two 1/2

 

http://www.nationalpost.com/artslife/story...0-3503C8D52D08}

[Mher]

Here is upcoming Ararat Movie trailer you can download 6.5mg it with quik time player.

 

http://www.comingsoon.net/movies/a/ararat.php

 

Movie release date in US November 15th

 

Its been a long time comming, I can hardly wait!

[Armine]

I was recently in Armenia and I had the opportunity to see the film. Let me tell you all it is a great production there is not no word about it. Some people did not like it, they complained and said that it did not show the true agony our anscestors faced, but as I tought about it the reason why Atom Egoyan did not include too many scenes in which many of the acts done by the ottoman empire were not present because Egoyan wanted this film to actually reach America and be shown on the big screen. But let me tell you all that he did get his point across, Armenians will understand what he is trying to say, but I am not sure how well others will. He tells our story in a very special way, I am sure once the film premeres here everyone will see what I am talking about. I was truely amazing.

 

Armine

[Azat]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2002Oct10.html

 

A Cinematic Record of Atrocities Long Forgotten

 

 

By Nora Boustany

Friday, October 11, 2002; Page A29

 

When the lights came on after the screening of the film "Ararat" at the Library of Congress Tuesday, there was an exhausted hush. And then Atom Egoyan, the celebrated Canadian filmmaker, got to his feet and the audience came to life, standing up, too, and showering him with applause.

 

This was his latest creation, a two-hour feature built around the massacres of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1923. It explores the universal need for adversaries to negotiate the gaps between them -- and tells the contemporary moviegoer of atrocities that many Armenians feel the world has never properly recognized.

 

"Under the cover of war, you can get away with anything," Egoyan told the group, which included notables from the Armenian American community. " . . . Like Jews have to live with the continuous threat of anti-Semitism, Armenians have to live with this continuous denial."

 

His work, he said, is as much about the present as the past, about what happens when people don't listen to the past, and of the responsibility of those living now to make amends. The movie opens soon in theaters; the Library of Congress viewing was a preview hosted by Reps. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) and Joe Knollenberg (R-Mich).

 

Born in Cairo to Armenian parents, Egoyan grew up in Victoria, British Columbia. He learned of the massacres from his grandmother, an orphan and survivor.

 

Then, at age 14, his parents took him to Armenia. His father, an art gallery owner and painter who was too young to have experienced the horrors, went to pieces when he visited the Genocide Monument in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.

 

"It broke him. He had been in denial of what effect this all had on his life," Egoyan said. Nearly ever since then, Egoyan has been looking for answers.

 

The germ of the idea for exploring those answers with this film, Egoyan said, came from his son, who at age 6 asked, "Did the Turks apologize for what they did?" Turkey denies that genocide took place, saying the killings occurred on both sides in a time of civil disorder.

 

When it was screened at the Moscow, a 500-seat theater in Yerevan that usually features old Hollywood films, villagers came by the busload to view it. It seemed to Egoyan an "amazing homecoming" for them, with authenticity heightened by a soundtrack that was recorded in Armenia and included chants and the sounds of church bells.

 

The film is loaded with searing images from the time: the burning of brides, rape and famine, the exodus of millions of Armenians. It draws its name from Mount Ararat, the snowcapped mountain in modern Turkey that symbolizes Armenian identity.

 

Ararat is a film within a film, dealing with relationships between people on a movie set and between the characters they play.

 

The central character is an aging Armenian filmmaker who has blocked his memory of those times, but now wants to make a cinematic record of them. There's a beautiful but selfish art historian who acts as consultant on the film, and is a widow twice over -- one husband died while attempting to assassinate a Turkish diplomat, another committed suicide because she was going to leave him.

 

Everywhere the viewer finds missed opportunities: The central character fails to address the quandaries of an aspiring Turkish Canadian actor who plays a monstrous Ottoman officer; the art historian fails to explain to her son his father's rage and hatred.

 

At the end, a miracle happens in a dark airport office. A Canadian customs official played by Christopher Plummer stops the art historian's son, who is returning from a clandestine filming excursion to Mount Ararat. The official, entirely ignorant of what happened in Armenia so long ago, ends up watching some of his footage and hearing his stories and is deeply moved by the suffering of people.

 

"I had to make it current, yet deal with these images we live with," Egoyan said yesterday in an interview at the Four Seasons.

 

There was a generation of Armenian activists who wanted to go out and assassinate Turkish diplomats in revenge. "Many Armenians would like to forget that, but there is this legacy. I wanted to bring it all into the soup and make it as encyclopedic as possible," Egoyan said.

 

"I wanted to create a forum and a discussion for everything," he said. "Artists have to resist seeing things in black and white. People have to understand that there are other issues. To really absorb someone else's history, you have to address the complexity of experiences."

 

Rouben Adalian of the Armenian National Institute said Egoyan's work was a leap beyond "scholars' efforts to retrieve history." The director "built this visual narrative with a sequence of images. I think the depth of it is conveyed by the many layers of stories that attempt to capture the generational aftermath. Eighty-seven years of humanity is still trying to deal with this difficult story."

 

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

 

[ October 12, 2002, 10:15 PM: Message edited by: Azat ]

[joseph]

Thank you Azat I was going to post the same artical, you saved me lot of worke.