CUT TO THE FUTURE
Ahram online, Egypt
Nov 21 2014
Nora Koloyan-Keuhnelian attended the screening of the Cairo Film
Festival’s opening film, The Cut, a Turkish-German filmmaker’s moving
statement on the Armenian genocide
“At first I expected that Turks and Armenians would not like the film
and the West would like it, but then I realised Turks and Armenians
liked the film and the West did not.” These were the words with which
Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin addressed the audience before
last week’s screening of The Cut.
The Cut, the first movie by a director with Turkish roots, tells the
story of Nazaret Manougian, a young Armenian man who is taken from his
family by the Ottomans. He survives the 1915 massacre but most of his
family are slaughtered. Everyone is gone except for his twin daughters.
Manougian, played by Algerian-French actor Tahar Rahim, embarks on a
difficult journey in search of his children. The $21 million movie
was first released in August 2014 and was selected to compete for
the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival. It was
released in German theatres in September, screened in london and
Paris earlier this month.
To a viewer with Armenian roots, many aspects of the movie are
unmistakably symbolic. It starts with a light on a map showing Mardin
and Ras Al-Ayn, towns in present-day southeastern Turkey near the
Syrian border.
Nazaret is an Armenian Christian blacksmith who lives in Mardin. He
is married to Rachel (the Moroccan singer Hindi Zahra) and they have
twin daughters, Lusine and Arsine (Dina and Zein Fakhouri).
In the first scene, Nazar, as they used to call him, goes to pick
up his daughters from school. When their teacher sends them away
with their father, she gives him a handkerchief they have made with
their names embroidered on it. Nazar admires his daughters’ skill and
decides to keep the handkerchief close to him at all times. It becomes
something he holds onto throughout his journey. The handkerchief
becomes torn and faded. Every time he washes it he looks at his
daughters’ names in needlework, it renews his hopes of finding them.
Another symbol is the crane Nazar sees while walking with his
daughters and staring at the sky. For Armenians, the crane symbolises
immigration, leaving one country for another, coming back with good
news for the homeland.
One night before they go to bed, Rachel is combing her hair and
singing. Suddenly, she stops, and Nazar, who was enjoying her voice,
objects, “Why did you stop singing?”
She starts again, but it’s as if she’s already had a premonition:
Ottoman gendarmes knock on the door to take Nazaret and his brother,
who are forced into slave labour under the burning desert sun and
then forced to march to their death, and that of the Armenian nation.
That same night, when Nazar puts the twins to bed, he tells them the
story of Mount Ararat, a symbol for all Armenians that stands proud on
the Turkish border today. Nazar is a person who is very close to God.
He goes to church and prays, he says grace at meals, just like the
rest of his family. This changes over the course of the movie: like
many genocide survivors, he starts to lose faith in God even as his
wife’s song, an Armenian folk tune, rings through his ears all through
his journey, giving him strength and hope.
Fatih Akin replays the bloody scenes of murder and rape from one of
the most painful tragedies in Armenian history. The Armenian captives
who refuse to convert to Islam have their hands tied to each other’s
before they are forced to kneel. An Ottoman officer gives the order,
“Cut!” And so it is. All were beheaded. But Mehmet, the Turkish
prisoner assigned the task of slaughtering Nazar, deliberately stops
and only wounds him on his neck. Nazar was left mute: he is saved,
helped through the desert by Mehmet and other humane Turks who give
him food.
Nazar sets out to the Ras Al-Ayn camp, where women and children were
taken. There he finds his sister-in-law, Ani (Arevig Mardirosian),
dying. As he holds her with his arm around her neck, the picture
turns grey, as if the colour is draining out of existence itself.
“God is not merciful,” she begs him. “End my suffering, Nazar.” Nazar
flexes his arm, tightening it. Her suffering ends. It is a common
enough trope of the genocide: even a mother will kill her baby to
save it from what is worse.
At Ras Al-Ayn Nazar finds out that Rachel and his sister were killed
but his daughters, he is told, were given to a Bedouin family. On his
journey he meets a Syrian soap-maker, Omar (played by the Palestinian
actor Makram Khouri), who takes him to Aleppo to work at his factory.
A place that ended up in the screenplay as an improvised refugee home
for Armenians after WWI.
Nazaret spends the next few years visiting orphanages in Syria and
Lebanon, until he recognises his now-teenaged girls Lusine and Arsine
in a photo hanging on the wall of a Beirut orphanage. He is told they
were married and have left to Cuba. At every destination, Nazaret is
disappointed: Florida, Minneapolis and finally North Dakota. But his
wife’s song stays with him until he finds Lusine; by then, Arsine
has died of illness.
One interesting message of the film is the warmth and hospitality the
genocide survivors received from their Arab neighbours, while the
West showed them no mercy at all. Even today the Armenian genocide
is all but ignored in the Western world.
The film is a courageous effort, couldn’t be more timely as we approach
the centennial of the Armenian genocide in 2015. The emotional impact
it had on this viewer was huge, but by the end of the first hour
the horror is already over, and the viewer accompanies Nazar on his
journey. The film is 138 minutes long.
Not everything is perfect, however. Despite everything Nazar goes
through he still looks young at the end of the film, except for a few
grey hairs (Rahim, after all, is still 33). His reunion with Lusine
after eight years is — perhaps inevitably — somewhat anticlimactic.
The dialogue is mostly in English, but includes Turkish, Arabic and
Spanish. Akin was criticised for this: his defence was that he can’t
speak Armenian and can only direct in a language he understands,
a fair enough point.
Alexander Hacke’s electric guitar music was beautiful, an apt
counterpoint to the historical background of the film. The script was
co-written by Mardik Mardin, a well-known Armenian Hollywood figure.
In an interview with the New York Times last August, Akin revealed
that The Cut was originally headed to the Cannes Film Festival,
but he pulled the movie at the last minute. His second thoughts were
apparently because of what he saw as a more guarded response to his
film by Cannes. Venice had responded with much more enthusiasm.
“The people in Cannes never rejected the film but I had the feeling
that it wasn’t what they expected from me, because it is historical,
because it’s in English, it’s not minimalistic. I’m not sure, but I
cannot fulfill other people’s expectations. I have to fulfill my own,”
he said.
Akin was born in Hamburg in 1973 to Turkish immigrant parents. His
Head On won the Golden Bear award at the 2004 Berlinale. The Edge of
Heaven received the Best Screenplay award and was nominated for the
Palm d’Or at the 2007 Cannes Festival.
Akin was born in Hamburg in 1973 to Turkish immigrant parents. His
Head On won the Golden Bear award at the 2004 Berlinale. The Edge of
Heaven received the Best Screenplay award and was nominated for the
Palm d’Or at the 2007 Cannes Festival.
His comedy, Soul Kitchen, received the Special Jury Prize at the
Venice Film Festival in 2009. Akin had been working on The Cut since
2007. Whether it will ever be screened in Turkey remains to be seen.
From: Baghdasarian
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/News/7778/23/Cut-to-the-future.aspx