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Today's Zaman, Turkey
Sept 1 2014
For `The Cut' director Akın, art is worth dying for
Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akın said that `art is worth dying for'
when asked about death threats he received recently from
ultranationalist groups for his newest film `The Cut,' which premiered
on Sunday in competition at this year's Venice Film Festival.
Speaking at a press conference in Venice before his film's hotly
anticipated premiere, Akın told reporters that he received hate mail
and threats on Twitter from an ultranationalist, pan-Turkist
periodical after the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos published an
interview with him on July 30 about his new film, which focuses on the
plight of Ottoman Armenians who were uprooted from their villages
during World War I and sent on death marches into the desert or
conscripted into forced labor gangs.
The last in what Akın calls his `Love, Death and the Devil' trilogy,
`The Cut' follows the fictional story of an Armenian blacksmith named
Nazaret Manoogian, who is separated from his wife and twin daughters
during atrocities against Ottoman Armenians in 1915 and later, after
the Ottomans' defeat in the war, sets out on a journey around the
world to find them.
`Art is worth dying for,' Akın said during Sunday's press conference,
adding: `I spent the past seven or eight years preparing myself for
all the controversy this film would stir and I'm now ready to face it.
All I can say is that I did receive threats but I really don't want to
dwell on this matter,' the DoÄ?an news agency reported.
Following its Venice premiere, `The Cut' is slated for an October
release in Germany. A Turkish theatrical release date has yet to be
announced for the film.
Creating empathy on the screen
But as the threats he received even before the film's world premiere
prove, the film might bring more controversy for Akın after its
Turkish release. So, he conceded, `One trick I used was I took the
genocide on the Native Americans and used it just as a snap of an
idea, you know, so that even people who deny the fact of the genocide
of the Armenians can identify themselves with the hero in that moment,
to reflect about it later,' Reuters reported.
Akın was referring to a scene in which Nazaret, who ends up working on
a railroad construction crew in North Dakota, is brutally beaten with
a shovel when he intervenes to stop one of the workers raping a Native
American woman.
Co-written by Akın and Mardik Martin and shot on a budget of 15
million euros, `The Cut' stars French-Algerian heartthrob Tahar Rahim
as Nazaret, who travels from Aleppo to Havana and then to North Dakota
in search of his missing girls.
The character in the film does not just take a physical journey
though, Akın said. There is a `spiritual part to it as well. Tahar
Rahim's character gradually loses his faith but later on he discovers
a different kind of spiritualism. I have been on a spiritual quest
myself [at some point in my life], and that led me to create the
character Nazaret,' Akın said.
Akın's co-scriptwriter Martin was also in attendance at the press
conference, along with cast members Rahim, Lara Heller, Hindi Zahra,
Makram Khoury and Simon Abkarian.
`The film that Fatih made is the film that Armenians have been waiting
for,' Abkarian said at the press conference. `It took time. The first
generation had to survive, the second generation had to live and the
third generation had to react and claim what we had to claim, which is
the recognition of the genocide, most of it. And I think that one film
is never enough to tell such a story, we have to make more.'
Critical reception for `The Cut' was lukewarm, with Variety's Jay
Weissberg calling it a drama that `had all the makings of a majestic
adventure picture, yet falters with its pedestrian script and
mise-en-scène' while The Hollywood Reporter called it `an ambitious
but only intermittently stirring historical epic.'
The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw said Akın's story was compassionately
handled, but the film lacked the subtlety of the director's earlier,
non-English language work.
`A big, ambitious, continent-spanning piece of work, concerned to show
the Armenian horror was absorbed into the bloodstream of
immigrant-descended population in the United States, but it is a
little simplistic emotionally, especially in its latter half,'
Bradshaw wrote.
Hard-hitting global issues on big screen in Venice
The Venice Film Festival has earned a reputation over the decades for
tackling controversial political and social issues head on, and this
year has been no exception. Other festival films that touch upon such
issues include a documentary, `The Look of Silence,' about massacres
in Indonesia in the mid-1960s where death squads killed as many as 1.5
million people in purges following a failed communist coup. The
Iranian film `Ghesseha' (Tales) looks at hardships of life in Tehran
that its director, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, said are in part the result
of harsh international sanctions. `Loin des Hommes' (Far from Men) is
set at the beginning of the Algerian war against French colonial rule
in the 1950s and stars Viggo Mortensen as a former major in the French
army who is teaching in a school in a remote part of the Atlas
Mountains. He is forced into a life-or-death desert trek with an Arab
villager, played by Reda Kateb, that makes them overcome cultural
distrust and learn to rely on one another. Mortensen said he thought
it was the most powerful, and even subversive, film about the Algerian
conflict since Gillo Pontecorvo's famous `The Battle of Algiers' of
1966. `There's nothing nowadays more subversive than loving and
showing compassion and meeting in the middle,' Mortensen said. `It
seems so difficult for people to do, more and more, so I think it's
very subversive in that sense.' Venice Reuters
http://www.todayszaman.com/arts-culture_for-the-cut-director-akin-art-is-worth-dying-for_357362.html
From: A. Papazian
Sept 1 2014
For `The Cut' director Akın, art is worth dying for
Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akın said that `art is worth dying for'
when asked about death threats he received recently from
ultranationalist groups for his newest film `The Cut,' which premiered
on Sunday in competition at this year's Venice Film Festival.
Speaking at a press conference in Venice before his film's hotly
anticipated premiere, Akın told reporters that he received hate mail
and threats on Twitter from an ultranationalist, pan-Turkist
periodical after the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos published an
interview with him on July 30 about his new film, which focuses on the
plight of Ottoman Armenians who were uprooted from their villages
during World War I and sent on death marches into the desert or
conscripted into forced labor gangs.
The last in what Akın calls his `Love, Death and the Devil' trilogy,
`The Cut' follows the fictional story of an Armenian blacksmith named
Nazaret Manoogian, who is separated from his wife and twin daughters
during atrocities against Ottoman Armenians in 1915 and later, after
the Ottomans' defeat in the war, sets out on a journey around the
world to find them.
`Art is worth dying for,' Akın said during Sunday's press conference,
adding: `I spent the past seven or eight years preparing myself for
all the controversy this film would stir and I'm now ready to face it.
All I can say is that I did receive threats but I really don't want to
dwell on this matter,' the DoÄ?an news agency reported.
Following its Venice premiere, `The Cut' is slated for an October
release in Germany. A Turkish theatrical release date has yet to be
announced for the film.
Creating empathy on the screen
But as the threats he received even before the film's world premiere
prove, the film might bring more controversy for Akın after its
Turkish release. So, he conceded, `One trick I used was I took the
genocide on the Native Americans and used it just as a snap of an
idea, you know, so that even people who deny the fact of the genocide
of the Armenians can identify themselves with the hero in that moment,
to reflect about it later,' Reuters reported.
Akın was referring to a scene in which Nazaret, who ends up working on
a railroad construction crew in North Dakota, is brutally beaten with
a shovel when he intervenes to stop one of the workers raping a Native
American woman.
Co-written by Akın and Mardik Martin and shot on a budget of 15
million euros, `The Cut' stars French-Algerian heartthrob Tahar Rahim
as Nazaret, who travels from Aleppo to Havana and then to North Dakota
in search of his missing girls.
The character in the film does not just take a physical journey
though, Akın said. There is a `spiritual part to it as well. Tahar
Rahim's character gradually loses his faith but later on he discovers
a different kind of spiritualism. I have been on a spiritual quest
myself [at some point in my life], and that led me to create the
character Nazaret,' Akın said.
Akın's co-scriptwriter Martin was also in attendance at the press
conference, along with cast members Rahim, Lara Heller, Hindi Zahra,
Makram Khoury and Simon Abkarian.
`The film that Fatih made is the film that Armenians have been waiting
for,' Abkarian said at the press conference. `It took time. The first
generation had to survive, the second generation had to live and the
third generation had to react and claim what we had to claim, which is
the recognition of the genocide, most of it. And I think that one film
is never enough to tell such a story, we have to make more.'
Critical reception for `The Cut' was lukewarm, with Variety's Jay
Weissberg calling it a drama that `had all the makings of a majestic
adventure picture, yet falters with its pedestrian script and
mise-en-scène' while The Hollywood Reporter called it `an ambitious
but only intermittently stirring historical epic.'
The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw said Akın's story was compassionately
handled, but the film lacked the subtlety of the director's earlier,
non-English language work.
`A big, ambitious, continent-spanning piece of work, concerned to show
the Armenian horror was absorbed into the bloodstream of
immigrant-descended population in the United States, but it is a
little simplistic emotionally, especially in its latter half,'
Bradshaw wrote.
Hard-hitting global issues on big screen in Venice
The Venice Film Festival has earned a reputation over the decades for
tackling controversial political and social issues head on, and this
year has been no exception. Other festival films that touch upon such
issues include a documentary, `The Look of Silence,' about massacres
in Indonesia in the mid-1960s where death squads killed as many as 1.5
million people in purges following a failed communist coup. The
Iranian film `Ghesseha' (Tales) looks at hardships of life in Tehran
that its director, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, said are in part the result
of harsh international sanctions. `Loin des Hommes' (Far from Men) is
set at the beginning of the Algerian war against French colonial rule
in the 1950s and stars Viggo Mortensen as a former major in the French
army who is teaching in a school in a remote part of the Atlas
Mountains. He is forced into a life-or-death desert trek with an Arab
villager, played by Reda Kateb, that makes them overcome cultural
distrust and learn to rely on one another. Mortensen said he thought
it was the most powerful, and even subversive, film about the Algerian
conflict since Gillo Pontecorvo's famous `The Battle of Algiers' of
1966. `There's nothing nowadays more subversive than loving and
showing compassion and meeting in the middle,' Mortensen said. `It
seems so difficult for people to do, more and more, so I think it's
very subversive in that sense.' Venice Reuters
http://www.todayszaman.com/arts-culture_for-the-cut-director-akin-art-is-worth-dying-for_357362.html
From: A. Papazian