Buena Vista Home Video Ararat (2 Discs)

I liked this movie because unlike most movies about massacre and persecution in the Old World, this movie follows up on the persecuted peoples, in this case the Armenians, as they find the life in their new country-of-refusge, Canada. As is the case with real, live human beings, escaping persecution to safety and "freedom" is not enough to address the complexity of the human soul. All of the Armenian-Canadians portrayed in the film live in a New World context and suffer from New World problems along with the alienations and isolations of New World lives. As in all Egoyan movies, most of the film protagonists in this exsemble work do not exist merely as didactic sterotypes. They breath, their relationship to their heritage is compromised in the personal life, they suffer. They suffer in a way which is special to the New World, Canada and The United States alike.Instead of bringing us a dry, linear account, the story of the Armenian massacre in Eastern Turkey is told indirectly, through the filming of a film about it. In many instances the viewer is confused, not certain if it actually is a flashback to the actual past or merely the scenes of the massacre being filmed for the film. Does it matter? What is the relationship between the actual events and the events portrayed in the film? One keeps wondering about that.Like all Egoyan films, the production is professional and smooth. The themes of his earlier movies about emotional disconnection and the use of video and vice to overcome that disconnection appear here as well. That is perhaps what makes this movie special: In exploring his own Armenian heritage, he never drops the ball of his old themese and concerns. He never forgets or ignores thay they are all in Canada now and that the fact that the Armenians were persecuted in the Old World, does not solve their problems of existentiality and their own estrangement in a New World Society.Egoyan offers us a new model for the making of films about cataclyismic, life ruining problems. I wish that movies of this type could have been made about the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Refugee Problem.

I had not wanted to watch Ararat, as I had not liked Egoyan's Calender, however, knowing Aznavour was appearing in the movie,I felt I had to see it. It was brilliant and full of Awen (Celtic word for devine inspiration). My audio play "1921 the Christmas Letter" had just begun airing on radio stations and is about the Armenian Genocide and I only wish I knew where to send it to Egoyan and Aznavour as thank you presents. My family was from Kerope (only 56 known survivors) and my father now 93, escaped from Turkey to Russia, got caught up in the Russian Revolution, and then escaped back into Turkey and then to America, all by the age of ten. I've lived with the Genocide all my life and am tired of people not even knowing what an Armenian is. This movie is about all genocides, and it touched me to the depths of my soul. As a writer I loved the subtlety and the stories within stories, as well as the almost twist of an end. The acting was excellent and not overdone and dramatic to the point of being a mochery. I have recomended this movie to everyone who is sensitive,caring, intelligent and those that need to be enlightened about what the denial of the genocide means to someone like me. I have been angry all my life. I have bled and cried in my despair. I have pleaded with the ancient gods of Urartu for justice. When will there ever be a justice with eyes and a mouth that sees and speaks the truth? Will the Turks ever know the truth, or is Justice as blind as the Turks have been for over a century? Ararat, gave me hope. As a writer, (10 books including "The Armenians of Worcester") I include Armenians in many of my stories and articles. I think the antique world knows what an Armenian is but what about the nurse at the hospital who asked it Armenians came from Pakistan, or the couple in Atlanta, who asked me what tribe of Indians the Urartians were? You think sometimes it is just like banging your head on the wall and then a miracle happens and this miracle is called Ararat. Blessed are they that morn for they shall be comforted...and I was.

Several plotlines unfold in this movie. All are built around the theme of knowing what happened when outside an event. To understand the parallels being drawn when you first watch the film I respectfully suggest focusing on just two of the plotlines. Juxtapose the main plotline, the perspectives that two native Canadians (one of Turkish descent, the other of Armenian descent) bring to the filming in the present day of a movie about the liquidation by Turks of some number of Armenians and what came before it, with the death of a man and how that death is viewed by that man's wife and daughter. The daughter says the man was essentially driven to death by the wife, the wife says the man died by accident. The moment of the death is depicted in a flashback from a third-person perspective. At the crucial moment, however, the camera pans away and back and we don't know why the man is dead, only that he is dead. As a result both wife and daughter have plausible arguments, but we (and they) will never know the "truth". Just as the film within the film is an attempt to tell but one side's "truth", so do both Canadians, ethnic Turk and ethnic Armenian, adopt positions that suit their ancestral identity and take as their starting point the events that suit their argument, but they will never know the "truth". And meantime two people who are both human beings distance themselves from each other because they cannot live with ambiguity about the past (a past they never experienced to boot). And so: Armenians and Turks are dead. Bosnians and Serbs are dead. Jewish Semites and Arab Semites are dead. Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants are dead. Shall we in this "New World" add to those dead or shall we affirm that we are all one race, the human race. That is the question that Egoyan answers in the affirmative and why I enjoyed this brilliant effort that is at least as deserving of acclaim as Rashomon.