Armenian genocide drama The Promise debuts new, classy poster

March 17, 2017 By administrator

The Armenian Genocide is an important, and tragic, event that is not as well-known as you’d think. It was one of the first times in the modern era something like that was attempted (pre-empting the Holocaust and Darfur and many others in the decades to come). So while it’s great that this event is coming to light for more people who might not have been aware, I am wary of turning into an old-school historical love-triangle. It’s maybe a bit too old-fashioned? Didn’t we learn our lesson from PEARL HARBOR? But I love Oscar Isaac and Christian Bale, so I’m willing to give it a shot (and besides, I always enjoy a grand, sweeping epic now and again).

Here’s the official synopsis:

THE PROMISE takes place during the Armenian Genocide and tells the story of an Armenian medical student (Isaac) during the final days of the Ottoman Empire. He falls in love with Ana (Le Bon), causing issues with her boyfriend Chris (Bale). The Armenian Genocide resulted in a reported 1.5 million deaths and took place from 1915-1923.

Source: http://www.joblo.com/movie-news/epic-drama-the-promise-with-christian-bale-oscar-isaac-releases-poster-991

Assange legal drama enters new phase

November 14, 2016 By administrator

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is set to be questioned by a Swedish lawyer in his London asylum. This means the grounds for the existing warrant against him will no longer apply, but he still won’t be safe from arrest.

The email affair that dogged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the recent US election played a large part in the triumph of her Republican opponent Donald Trump. The scandal can be traced to a six-storey apartment building in the exclusive London district of Knightsbridge, the raised ground floor of which houses the Ecuadorian embassy.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has spent the past four years here in asylum. For months the disclosure website put pressure on Hillary Clinton by feeding a constant flow of information into the public domain. In mid-October the Ecuadorian embassy cut its guest’s access to the Internet, presumably at the United States’ request.

However, WikiLeaks does not consist of Julian Assange alone. The revelations continued. On the day of the election, Julian Assange declared that neither he nor WikiLeaks had any interest in influencing the result in any way, especially as both Trump and Clinton were extremely hostile to whistleblowers. But he said WikiLeaks’ job was to publish material if it was authentic and of news value. This, he said, was undoubtedly the case with the documents from the Clinton camp. The 45-year-old Australian claimed that WikiLeaks would have loved to have published documents about Trump and his team as well, had they been sent any.

Six-year investigation

Right now, though, Julian Assange’s agenda is dominated by something else entirely. On Monday, Stockholm’s chief prosecutor, Ingrid Isgren, accompanied by a Swedish police officer, will walk down Basil Street, past the solidarity vigil being organized by Assange’s supporters and into the Ecuadorian embassy. There she will question Julian Assange about the rape accusation that has dogged him for the past six years, despite the fact that no charges have been brought.

This interrogation, a step forward after years of standoff, is part of an investigation that began in 2010. The case was in fact closed by a state prosecutor in Stockholm in August 2010, on the grounds that it was not possible to establish that a crime had been committed. However, Marianne Ny, a state prosecutor from Göteborg, took the case up again.

What needs to be understood is that Swedish law governing sexual offenses is unusually broad. The woman whose statements form the basis of the preliminary investigation at no time felt threatened by Assange: There was never any talk of violence. It was enough for her to say that on a night in which they had already had sex, he penetrated her again while she was half-asleep – without using a condom. When the woman visited a Stockholm police station in August 2010, she was seeking information on how she could make Assange take an AIDS test.

Fears of extradition to the US

The European arrest warrant under which Assange was detained in England, more than 2,160 days ago, is intended only to make it possible for representatives of the Swedish justice system to question him. Once he has been questioned, the grounds for this arrest warrant would automatically cease to apply.

Source: http://www.dw.com/en/assange-legal-drama-enters-new-phase/a-36378413

Fatih Akin talks Genocide-themed drama “The Cut” at Marrakech Fest

December 9, 2015 By administrator

Speaking to a packed auditorium during a 90-minute masterclass at the 15th Marrakech Film Festival, 42-year old German-Turkish helmer Fatih Akin provided fascinating insights into his inspirations and working methods, Variety reports.

One of the main focuses during the masterclass was Akin’s 2014 feature, “The Cut”, about the 1915 Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Turkey, which he had wanted to direct for many years because of his own Turkish origins and because this is a taboo subject in Turkey.

He explained that he tried to make a film that would be appealing to both Armenians and Turks but ended up receiving severe criticism from both sides.

“I used to think that a film can change the world, just like rock n’roll has changed the world. But I now realize that one film can’t do that. The most difficult thing for ‘The Cut’ was its reception. I received criticism from all over the world. Both sides beat the shit out of me. Which I suppose means it has something, right?”

Akin lensed “The Cut” in the style of a John Ford western – with moody clouds against the blue sky – and says that he is increasingly interested in the psychology of colors, having read widely on the subject, including writings by Goethe, and increasingly watches Asian cinema, precisely due to their use of colors.

The helmer says that growing up in Germany made him want to address the Armenian Genocide, in part because of the manner in which the Holocaust is a deep part of German culture, whereas the Armenian Genocide continues to be taboo.

“As I grew up, I used to think that the Holocaust had nothing to do with me or my parents, because I wasn’t born at the time and they didn’t live in Germany. But while making ‘The Cut,’ I realized that I had equal responsibility for both genocides. Also for the genocides in Laos, in Algeria and in North and South America. Whenever one group of human beings gangs up to kill another group.”

Although “The Cut” received a frosty critical reaction, especially in Turkey, Akin says that he views the Turkish audience as his brothers and sisters. “They are my audience. When you love somebody, you also have to have space to criticize them. That’s what my critics don’t understand. And I’ve given up trying to make them understand.”

The Guardian: Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad review – Armenia’s tragedy becomes meaty drama

May 22, 2015 By administrator

Love on the run … Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad. Photograph: PR

Cannes 2015

French-Armenian director Robert Guédiguian takes on the Armenian genocide and the campaign of vengeance against Turkey in a film that goes in unexpected directions

The indefatigable Robert Guédiguian returns to the highminded thriller style that proved successful with his 2009 picture The Army of Crime, which unveiled local complicity in the betrayal of a wartime resistance cell in German occupied Marseilles. This new film, for which the original French title is a slightly more snappy Une Histoire de Fou (A Story of Madness), jumps forwards three decades, to Marseilles in the 1970s, and takes as its subject the wave of bombings and assassinations perpetrated by Armenian radicals against Turkish interests, in response to the genocidal killings of Armenians during and after the first world war.

With his Armenian heritage, this counts as deeply personal territory for Guédiguian; though you sense that the director’s uncompromising political sternness makes it difficult for him to fully plant a flag. Nevertheless, he has produced a film that both acts as a useful primer for understanding the decades-long grievance that the Armenian genocide produced, and discusses the peculiar politics of direct action terror in the 1970s.

Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad begins with a black-and-white preface, describing the assassination of Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman minister generally considered to have initiated the 1915 massacres, by Soghomon Tehlirian in Berlin in 1921; he was acquitted by a German court who, somewhat ironically, were outraged by Tehlirian’s accounts of Turkish-organised death marches and concentration camps. The film then abruptly cuts to the 1970s and the Armenian diaspora in Marseilles where we home in on a storekeeper called Hovannes (Simon Abkarian, from Army of Crime), his wife Anouch (Ariane Ascaride, Guédiguian’s wife and regular collaborator), and hotheaded son Aram (Syrus Shahidi). Fed with tales of Turkish brutality by Anouch’s aged mother, Aram joins a local group of like-minded agitators, which becomes the gateway drug of the very 70s form of urban terrorism. Soon Aram finds himself clutching a detonator, waiting to blow up the Turkish ambassador to France.

t’s here that Guédiguian’s takes a significant detour into more complex moral discussion. As Aram is about to push the button, a random cyclist pulls up behind the ambassador’s car; Aram makes the choice to set off the bomb anyway. The cyclist, called Gilles, is not killed, but severely enough injured to require months of operations and be largely confined to a wheelchair. Aram disappears to Beirut, there to join up with like-minded urban guerrillas and continue the campaign of terror; but racked with guilt, Anouch tracks Gilles down and offers him the family’s help, as a kind of penance. Gilles, angry and bitter, takes up the offer; after practically moving into Aram’s old bedroom, he starts to take on and identify with the Armenian cause. Meanwhile, over in Beirut, Aram swiftly becomes disillusioned with his commander’s callousness towards innocent bystanders – as Gilles once was – but can’t quite bring himself to quit for a more principled splinter group to stay with his lover, Anahit.

All this makes for a meaty two-hour-plus drama, with Guédiguian sketching in the moral dilemmas with clarity and firmness. The central debate is rehearsed again and again: can innocents ever be sacrificed for a cause, however urgent? Some of the dialogue is a little decks-clearing – Ascaride at one point quickly explains that “most Armenians abhor violence” – while the largely studio-bound sets make the film feel a little airless. It’s only when we get to Armenia in the final frames that the horizons open up. Guédiguian, none the less, has something interesting to say; his film is always good, if it’s not quite brilliant.

Source: The Guardian