Deutsche Welle, Germany
Aug 3 2014
Akin delays Turkish film on murdered Armenian journalist
Turkish-German film director Fatih Akin says a film he wants to make
about the murdered Armenian journalist Hrant Dink remains on ice
because no Turkish actor was ready to play the lead role. Dink was
shot dead in 2007.
Akin, who has collected a string of German and European cinema awards
over 2 decades, told Saturday’s edition of the Turkish-Armenian weekly
Agos on Saturday that the risks for Turkish actors were still too high
and so he had put the project “in the freezer.”
Dink was shot dead by a teenage Turkish ultranationalist on a busy
Istanbul street in 2007, outside the offices of Agos.
The 52-year-old Dink had campaigned for reconciliation between Turks
and Armenians, who say that up to 1.5 million people were killed in
1915, during World War I, as the Ottoman Empire fell apart.
Turkey has long denied that the deaths amounted to a massacre,
although in April Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke of “our
shared pain.”
Script ‘too strong’
Akin said he had drafted a very text-rich script based on 12 of Dink’s
articles published in Agos.
Hrant Dink was shot in broad daylight in Istanbul
“However, I couldn’t convince any actor from Turkey to accept the role
of Hrant [Dink]; they all found the script too strong,” Akin said.
“I didn’t want to put any actor at risk, but it was also important
that a film about Hrant would be a Turkish film,” he added. “An
American or French actor couldn’t have been cast as Hrant. We have to
deal with this alone.”
Different entry at Venice festival
Akin said instead he combined parts of the Dink script to complete a
different film, “The Cut,” which will premier at Italy’s Venice
International Film Festival later this month.
“The Cut,” starring French actor Tahar Rahim, tells the story of an
Armenian man who survives the 1915 killings and embarks on a journey
across the world to find his daughter.
Dink’s assassination drew international attention and grew into a
wider scandal with accusations of a Turkish state conspiracy.
At his funeral, an estimated 200,000 people marched, chanting “We are
all Armenians.”
In February this year, the New York-based Committee to Protect
Journalists ranked Turkey as the world’s leading jailer of
journalists.