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Times of Malta, Malta
Sept 2 2014
Venice festival tackles hard-hitting subjects
Films look at slaughter of Armenians and Indonesians
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.
German-born Turkish director Fatih Akin's The Cut, shown on Sunday, is
a harrowing fictionalised look at the destruction of the Armenian
community in Ottoman Turkey during World War I which historians and
Armenians say was genocide.
Turkey denies this and says the widely cited death toll of 1.5 million
people is inflated.
Akin acknowledged at a news conference that he had received hate mail
about the film and even a death threat on Twitter, but said "please
don't make too much out of that".
"The film that Fatih made is the film that the Armenians have been
waiting for. Everybody always says, 'When are we making a film, a film
about the Armenian genocide?'," Simon Abkarian, one of the actors in
the film, said at a 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."
Other festival films 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.
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."
The Cut is the last in what the director calls his Love, Death and the
Devil trilogy and focuses on the plight of Armenians who are uprooted
from their villages and sent on death marches into the desert,
conscripted into forced labour gangs or killed outright.
The main figure is Nazaret Manoogian, played by Tahar Rahim, an
Armenian blacksmith who is separated from his wife and young twin
daughters in the middle of the night by Turkish soldiers, who take him
to a work camp, after which his town is cleared of Armenians.
He survives the forced labour in the desert and avoids having his
throat slit when his would-be executioner takes pity and only pretends
to kill him.
After Turkey's defeat in the war, he begins a quest that takes him to
Cuba and the US in search of his missing daughters who have fled
there, after their mother and the rest of their family were killed.
Nazaret ends up in North Dakota working on a railroad construction
crew and is brutally beaten with a shovel when he intervenes to stop
one of the workers raping a native American woman. Her plight recalls
the rape of an Armenian woman by Turks that Nazaret saw in Turkey but
could do nothing to stop.
"I had to create an empathy, an empathy for the hero, an empathy for
the story," Akin said.
"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 to the Armenians can identify themselves
with the hero in that moment, to reflect about it later."
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140902/arts-entertainment/Venice-festival-tackles-hard-hitting-subjects.534110
Sept 2 2014
Venice festival tackles hard-hitting subjects
Films look at slaughter of Armenians and Indonesians
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.
German-born Turkish director Fatih Akin's The Cut, shown on Sunday, is
a harrowing fictionalised look at the destruction of the Armenian
community in Ottoman Turkey during World War I which historians and
Armenians say was genocide.
Turkey denies this and says the widely cited death toll of 1.5 million
people is inflated.
Akin acknowledged at a news conference that he had received hate mail
about the film and even a death threat on Twitter, but said "please
don't make too much out of that".
"The film that Fatih made is the film that the Armenians have been
waiting for. Everybody always says, 'When are we making a film, a film
about the Armenian genocide?'," Simon Abkarian, one of the actors in
the film, said at a 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."
Other festival films 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.
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."
The Cut is the last in what the director calls his Love, Death and the
Devil trilogy and focuses on the plight of Armenians who are uprooted
from their villages and sent on death marches into the desert,
conscripted into forced labour gangs or killed outright.
The main figure is Nazaret Manoogian, played by Tahar Rahim, an
Armenian blacksmith who is separated from his wife and young twin
daughters in the middle of the night by Turkish soldiers, who take him
to a work camp, after which his town is cleared of Armenians.
He survives the forced labour in the desert and avoids having his
throat slit when his would-be executioner takes pity and only pretends
to kill him.
After Turkey's defeat in the war, he begins a quest that takes him to
Cuba and the US in search of his missing daughters who have fled
there, after their mother and the rest of their family were killed.
Nazaret ends up in North Dakota working on a railroad construction
crew and is brutally beaten with a shovel when he intervenes to stop
one of the workers raping a native American woman. Her plight recalls
the rape of an Armenian woman by Turks that Nazaret saw in Turkey but
could do nothing to stop.
"I had to create an empathy, an empathy for the hero, an empathy for
the story," Akin said.
"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 to the Armenians can identify themselves
with the hero in that moment, to reflect about it later."
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140902/arts-entertainment/Venice-festival-tackles-hard-hitting-subjects.534110