The Daily Star, Lebanon
Sept 1 2014
Venice film fest puts hard-hitting global issues on screen
Michael Roddy| Reuters
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.
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 One 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’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.”
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 Iranian film “Ghesseha” (Tales) looks at hardships of life in
Tehran that its director, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, said in part are the
result of harsh international sanctions.
LAST IN TRILOGY
“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 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.”