Scene from film The Promise (2016) by Terry George.
A movie that portrays a romance taking place during the massacre of Armenians during World War I in what is now Turkey premiers in U.S. theaters on April 21.
The Promise stars Oscar Isaac as an Armenian medical student and Christian Bale as an American foreign correspondent, both of whom fall in love with the same woman.
Their love triangle unfolds as the Ottoman Empire’s entry into the war is followed by the 1915 massacre of Christian Armenians.
Terry George, who directed the 2004 Oscar-nominated historical drama Hotel Rwanda, said shooting The Promise coincided with news of Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority being massacred by Islamic State militants and the mass exodus of Syrian refugees fleeing carnage in their country.
“As we were shooting, we were watching the same events in the same location — people under siege in the mountains and drowning in the Mediterranean,” George said.
While Armenia, many Western historians, foreign parliaments, and scholars say the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians in a period beginning in 1915 constituted an act of genocide, Turkey denies that and contends the Armenians died in partisan fighting.