You can talk about Holocaust denial, but it's really marginal for the most part. What is compelling about the Armenian genocide, is how it has been forgotten.
From Atom Egoyan
The father's greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.
My parents taught me to believe that through the creative act, we're able to transcend and give a response to desecration.
The whole film is about people being convinced that they can reduce themselves to their archetypes.
There is a certain moment in the film when the son is in the nursing home and he goes to the television and turns it off because he sees himself in the image.
I suppose I had these concerns but I really felt that I had to keep my scope very, very concentrated.
Working on the themes I was interested in, through the context of a particular family, was a very economical way of dealing with a lot of the issues I was concerned with.
It is about this very abstract sense of displacement that he feels the moment he turns off the television.
These are very subtle things, of course, and I don't expect everyone to pick them up consciously, but I think that there is something there that you must be able to feel, there is an energy at work that I must trust my audience will be able to pick up at some level.
I have always felt that this story is universal. When I began to understand the details of the history, I felt that the most compelling aspect was not what happened, but what continues to happen and how it is denied.
2 perspectives
1 perspectives