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Turkish director's film on Armenian Genocide premieres at Venice Fil

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  • Turkish director's film on Armenian Genocide premieres at Venice Fil

    Turkish director's film on Armenian Genocide premieres at Venice Film Festival

    14:29 01.09.2014


    German-born Turkish director Fatih Akin's film on the Armenian
    Genocide - The Cut - premiered at Venice Film Festival Sunday, Reuters
    reports.

    Akin acknowledged at a news conference that he'd 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."

    "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 labor 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 labor 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 America 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.armradio.am/en/2014/09/01/turkish-directors-film-on-armenian-genocide-premieres-at-venice-film-festival/

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC6dXBUGkh8

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