Moving the Mountain

When Atom Egoyan's son, Arshile, was six or seven, the Canadian director decided it was time to share with him some painful family history: the deaths of more than 1 million Armenians, including some of Egoyan's paternal relatives, at the hands of the Ottoman Turks during World War I. In response, the little boy had one inevitable question:

"Did the Turks say sorry?"

Since the Turks have never admitted that the massacres and forced deportations amounted to genocide — they acknowledge only that many died on each side in World War I — Egoyan didn't know what to say. "I realized that by telling him the answer, the trauma of denial that I had been raised with would be transferred to him," says Egoyan. "I understood that I wanted to talk about how this trauma lives on today."

So Egoyan decided to make a movie — and cast in the title role a potent symbol: Ararat. Physically, Mount Ararat is located in western Turkey. Symbolically, the twin-peaked mountain dominates the geography of the Armenian soul. It represents eternal Armenia — its history, political identity and religious traditions dating back to the biblical Flood. Egoyan, 43, who was born in Cairo to Armenian parents, says "the film's structure reflects the Armenian psyche." That psyche is riven by dual realities — the country that was and the one that is; the loss of both human lives and "the very imprint of humanity in us." To portray that divide in Ararat — which has just opened in the U.K. and Portugal, and comes to Italy, the Czech Republic and Israel this week — Egoyan created a film within a film.

His movie is a contemporary tale of two families' searches for truth and reconciliation as they struggle with uncertainty, insecurity and the legacy of denial. One central character is a Canadian-Armenian director named Edward Saroyan (Charles Aznavour) who is making a film about the genocide. To tell the story, Saroyan restages the siege of Van, near the Iranian border, where Armenians with old rifles held off Turks with modern artillery for weeks before being crushed. Though Ararat is actually 200 km from Van, the mountain periodically "drifts" onto the fictional set. Poetic license, as Saroyan claims, or distortion? "There are many stories in the film that are being borne by tellers who are unreliable," says Egoyan, "but that doesn't diminish the need to tell it." The film's complex structure is not exactly audience-friendly, but Egoyan is unapologetic. "If something is complex, it just needs to be read more carefully," he says. "I don't agree with this tendency to make films for the lowest common denominator. I want to show how many different lives are ultimately connected, even though these strands seem so disparate."

Ararat's disparate yet connected lives include a production aide named Raffi (David Alpay), who vanishes to Turkey in search of his roots and returns with what he claims is extra footage for Saroyan's film; his mother, Ani (Egoyan's real-life wife, Arsinée Khanjian), an art historian and adviser on the fictional film; Celia (Marie Josée Croze), Raffi's stepsister, who blames Ani for their "freedom-fighter" father's death; and David (Christopher Plummer), the customs inspector who interrogates Raffi on his return to Toronto.

The characters talk endlessly. "The opposite of denial is the tendency to talk too much," says Egoyan. In some of the film's key scenes Raffi and David verbally spar in a darkened room over the contents of Raffi's cans, labeled Exposed Film. Will shining a light inside be ruinous as well as revelatory? Their dialogue is interspersed with brutal images of murder and rape as depicted in the fictional film. In a scene set during the shooting of the internal film, Armenian and Turkish actors are forced to confront the history that they either never learned or learned to suppress. "[Canada] is a new country, so let's just drop the f___ing history," Turkish actor Ali (Elias Koteas) tells Raffi.

For a director whose earlier films — Felicia's Journey, The Sweet Hereafter and Exotica — dealt with more abstract obsessions, Ararat is both personal and political. It premiered last September in Yerevan, Armenia's capital, and was enthusiastically received. The film has not yet been screened in Turkey. But with its scattered releases across Europe, Ararat is enabling a wider audience to explore a trauma that lives on today.