By Bruce Kirkland
TORONTO, Canada (The Toronto Sun)—The new historical drama “The Promise,” which just made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), has now been caught up in a maelstrom of denial about the Armenian Genocide.
A still photo from ‘The Promise’
As I write this on Sept. 12, 10,291 people have voted on the film on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), most of them giving wretched ratings that stupidly claim that “The Promise” is a terrible movie. But the truth is, most of those people have not seen the film. Only a fraction of that 10,000-plus—and thousands more expected to attack the film in the coming hours, days and months because of Turkish denial that the genocide ever happened—could have possibly seen the film at its two TIFF screenings so far.
So this is all about politics, even though Irish filmmaker Terry George has been trying to emphasize the romance in his opus. “The Promise” features Christian Bale, as an American journalist, and Oscar Isaac, as an Armenian medical student. Both men love the same woman in the Ottoman Empire during the cataclysmic events of World War I. Those events are all real, all documented, and include scenes of mass murders of Armenians by Turks, George said. But the romantic story is fiction.
“That’s the core of the film,” George told a TIFF press conference on Monday about the romance. “I want audiences to go to it for that entertainment experience. We’re hoping that we have a good old-fashioned love story going here.”
Despite that position, George obviously knows that the Armenian Genocide of 1915 is a hot-button topic, one that he is unafraid of. George brought “Hotel Rwanda,”, an African genocide story, to TIFF in 2004.
George said that the Armenian situation is complicated. “There is the political influence of the Turkish government which has, over the course of a century, managed to stifle and repress and deny this event. And today their strategic importance is greater than ever and this is a touchstone for them. Any time that the Armenian Genocide is mentioned, whether it be the centenary or a film like this, there is immediately a barrage of denial,” George said, adding “[T]his is not a question… The vast majority of historical study has determined that this was a planned attempt to wipe out the Armenian nation. And we need to get beyond that diversionary discussion to why. Why did it happen and how do we move on from that and how do we reconcile these two nations again?… Let’s bring the discussion out in the open.”
Source: Armenian Weekly
Link: ‘The Promise’ Caught Up in Genocide Denial Maelstrom