Intent To Destroy Archives

Watch GagruleLive Coverage “Intent to Destroy” Film Screening, The Promise institute UCLA

October 16, 2017 By administrator

Intent to Destroy Documentary

By Wally Sarkeesian

UCLA: October 12th the The Promise institute for Human right presented Special Advance Screening of the critically-acclaimed documentary Intent to Destroy directed by award-winning filmmaker Joe Berlinger. The room 1458 was packed with attendees young and old, the Director of The promise Institut Asli Bali PHD. began welcoming the audience with brief introduction. shortly After the film, she convene a panel featuring Intent to Destroy producers Dr. Eric Esrailian, Carla Garapedian and legendary Hollywood film producer Mike Medavoy. Followed with reception.

By shining a light on the mechanism of denial over the past century—and the aggressive suppression of genocide depiction—he aims to extinguish the notion of any “debate” by revealing the absurdity of denial against the irrefutable facts he comprehensively lays out in the film.

Pulling back the curtain on Genocide censorship in Hollywood due to U.S. government pressure to appease a strategic ally, Intent To Destroy embeds with a historic feature production as a springboard to explore the violent history of the Armenian Genocide and legacy of Turkish suppression and denial over the past century.

Joe Berlinger’s thirteenth feature documentary film captures the cinematic and political challenges of producing a historically meaningful, big-budget feature film in an environment rife with political suppression and threats of retaliation. By intertwining these three separate threads – the modern day production of The Promise, the history of the Genocide and the century of international repression – Intent To Destroy coalesces to provide a comprehensive view on the atrocities of 1915 to 1923 and their resounding aftermath right up until the present day.

As Elie Wiesel has so eloquently stated, the final stage of Genocide is denial. Intent to Destroy pulls back the curtain of political resistance and historical amnesia to finally present a more complete account of Armenia – the Genocide, its delayed recognition and a nearly forgotten history of suffering and heroism in the hope of inspiring a collective sense of international justice and humanity.

Joe Berlinger on the Armenian Genocide Documentary “Intent to Destroy” Video

October 16, 2017 By administrator

Nell Minow, Contributor

shareholder advocate, movie critic,

Huffingtonpost The word “genocide’ was created to describe the massacre of 1,500,000 Armenians by the Turks, a century ago. And yet, the story has all but been eliminated from our understanding of the 20th century, a more devastating erasure of history than the genocide itself because it erased the story, and because it erased any hope for justice.

A new documentary from director Joe Berlinger is the story about the story, about what happened, and about the efforts to prevent what happened from being told. “Intent to Destroy: Death, Denial, and Depiction,” in theaters November 10, 2018, has three chapters: behind the scenes in the filming of “The Promise,” starring Oscar Isaac and Christian Bale, an exploration of the denial that it ever took place, and the deception that led to repression of efforts to tell the truth and creation of a false counter-narrative.

Why start a documentary with the behind the scenes of a production about a fictional version of the event?

There are a couple of reasons why. From an aesthetic standpoint, this is complex and dense history and you want to make it digestible for a modern audience. I’m not a historical filmmaker who normally does things with talking heads and archival footage. From a practical standpoint it put me in a familiar place to tell an unfolding story and that gave me the dramatic structure to then hang all of this history.

From a thematic standpoint, there have been other documentaries about the facts of the genocide itself but what’s more interesting to me, what I actually wanted to make a film about, was the mechanism of denial, the aftermath of the denial and how denial operates. There is a checkered history of movie making on the theme of the Armenian genocide in Hollywood because any prior attempt to do a mainstream movie has been basically shut down. The Turkish government complains to the State Department and the State Department twists the Hollywood studio’s arm and it drops the project. As early as 1935 that’s what happened to Irving Thalberg when he was trying to make “Forty Days of Musa Dagh” and so when I heard a film was actually being made independently financed by Kirk Kerkorian, an Armenian, so clearly this was private money but it involved a lot of Hollywood people, an A-list director, I saw “The Promise” as a historic event.

So it wasn’t just embedding with the film to get some visual eye candy of behind the scenes of a movie. It was the perfect way to express what to me is the more important aspect of the film which is not just the history of the genocide but the actual hundred years of denial and how all that happened. I can tap into that thing that I think is the most interesting aspect of this story, how the narrative has changed. In 1915 when the genocide was beginning there were 145 articles in the New York Times and it was the largest humanitarian relief effort up until that point ever mounted to help people in a foreign country. Babe Ruth’s 50th home run bat was auctioned off to raise money so it was a shining moment in American history and yet today we have lost that vision of our past because it’s been systematically repressed and a counter narrative has been put out there. So what better way to talk about dueling narratives than by making a film about filmmaking?

A really special moment in the documentary is where we see them filming a character finding all the dead bodies because it’s where all the scenes kind of come together. You have Terry George trying to present an atrocity for a PG audience intercut with the actual survivors’ testimony so that it’s real for them while it’s a movie for these people, intercut with the archival footage of the day showing those gruesome photographs just to give an inkling to an audience of what it’s really like in a way that could never be shown in a mainstream motion picture and then we have the true behind the scenes with tender moment with Christian Bale working with a child.

Part of what made the third chapter so powerful was the way that it resonates with the era of fake news, Nazis being called “good people,” fights over Civil War statues and climate change denial.

For many of these people that history is still present today and if we discount those histories, if we don’t understand what we do when we blow up Iraq and unleash the wave of the ethnic strife as a result, we will keep getting it wrong. I’m not saying Saddam Hussein should have remained in power; it’s too complex to go so deeply into that. The Armenian Genocide is like the quintessential example of history that’s not been reckoned with and accounted for and beyond that you see how techniques are used to invalidate a historical reality.

Armenian Genocide doc “Intent To Destroy” to screen in Sydney

August 17, 2017 By administrator

Sydney audiences will have a unique opportunity to see “Intent To Destroy” – the Armenian Genocide documentary filmed during the production of “The Promise” – as part of Hamazkaine Shant Chapter’s Armenian Film Festival, which begins this Friday, August 18, reports the Armenian National Committee of Australia.

The “Intent to Destroy” screening, which is being co-hosted by the Armenian National Committee of Australia (ANC-AU), will close the Armenian Film Festival on Sunday, August 27. All films are being screened at Event Cinemas in Top Ryde.

Filmed on the set of Armenian Genocide epic, “The Promise”, this documentary by Joe Berlinger looks at the difficulties experienced by the producers, cast and crew of the film starring Christian Bale, Oscar Isaac and Charlotte Le Bon.

Here is a summary of the film from the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival which premiered “Intent to Destroy” in Australia earlier this year:

“Legendary documentarian Berlinger’s (Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Tony Robbins: I am Not Your Guru, Crude) thirteenth feature film, captures the cinematic and political challenges of producing a historically meaningful, big-budget film in an environment rife with political suppression.”

“In 2015, Academy Award-winning director Terry George (Hotel Rwanda) took on the challenge of making the first mainstream film about the 1915 Armenian Genocide that wiped out 1.5 million Armenians in The Promise (starring Oscar Isaac and Christian Bale). Berlinger’s film combines a mixture of exclusive behind-the- scenes footage, rare archival material and investigative interviews that capture the shocking and complex history of the Armenian Genocide, all while presenting the unfolding, real-time drama of bringing this long-ignored chapter of human cruelty to the big screen.”