“Fatih Akin’s very personal answer to this tragic chapter in world history is
of great intensity, beauty and impressive sublimity,” said Martin Scorsese about writer-director Akin's 2014 (Canadian-shot) film THE CUT,
starring Tahar Rahim and Toronto's Arsinée Khanjian and co-written by Armenian-American Mardik Martin (who had worked with Scorsese on RAGING BULL). With this film, the famous German arthouse director of Turkish descent dealt with the Armenian genocide that saw about one and a half million dead. Akin promptly found himself threatened in his parents' home country Turkey over his stance. The film opened to mixed reviews and vanished after
competing for the Golden Lion at the 71st Venice International Film Festival (Tribeca just picked it up for its "Spotlight").
The topic remains strangely controversial, with the German government, among others, mincing words this week until often outspoken German President Joachim Gauck pushed Chancellor Merkel and her coalition government to change their language from "massacre" (as the BBC Twitter feed still calls it) to
Völkermord, genocide, when commemorating its 100th anniversary today.
Fatih Akin travelled back a century for his film and crossed continents to portray one family. In 1915 a man survives the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, but loses his family as well as his speech (the film is largely silent). One night he learns that his twin daughters may be alive and goes on a quest to find them.
"THE CUT tells the story of the man Nazaret in mind-blowing images that in their monumentality sometimes appear proudly exhibitory. Nazaret survives the horror of the genocide, loses his belief in any god but at the same time does not lose faith.“ (Spiegel Online)
"Everything is shot in beautiful cinemascope, with lenses that come close to the human eye: the long-shots create distance onto the depicted violence, with no tension building up. Instead the slightly contrived and lofty focus is on breaking down the viewer in the face of suffering.” (Kino-zeit.de)
"It’s a big, ambitious, continent-spanning piece of work, concerned to show the Armenian horror was absorbed into the bloodstream of immigrant-descended population in the United States, but it is a little simplistic emotionally.... It doesn’t have the sophisticated nuance and wit of Akin’s contemporary German-language movies, like HEAD-ON (2004) and THE EDGE OF HEAVEN (2007)." (The Guardian)
“The decision to make the principle character mute is a brilliant maneuver that acknowledges the century of silence on the genocide in Turkey. The sequence — starting with an attempt to coerce Armenians into converting to Islam and around the genocide— is some of the strongest that the director has ever shot.” (indieWIRE.com)
“An enormously powerful and haunting drama.” (Filmstarts.de)
Originally, Akin had planned a film about Turkish-Armenian magazine editor Hrant Dink, who was assassinated in Istanbul in 2007. Akin is on record as saying that the only reason he did not get to make that film was because every Turkish actor he approached to play Dink bailed, fearing for their lives. Akin commented that apparently, the time has not come to make such a film.
April 24 is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.
by
Jutta Brendemühl
all images c Pandora Film
