Ararat

One thing I learnt from this movie, hitherto unknown to me is that there was a genocide of Armenians in Turkey in 1915 which left a million and more dead. Thats all I got out of this film by Atom Egoyan. I am a true outsider with no knowledge about the enmity between Turks and the Armenians. It seems like the director's idea was to reach out to the world and remind them of the forgotten Armenian genocide. But it was a very convoluted way he took to get the message across and by the end I felt like he never got it through. It'd have been much better had he made a film directly focussed on genocide instead of incorporating plots, plots, more plots and then some sub plots.

First there is the Canadian-Armenian young man, Raffi, who I think is the main character of the film. There are subplots involving him and his mother, him and his girlfriend(who is his step-sister), then his mother and his girl friend(who is her step daughter), him and the customs-officer and by the end you lose track of everything and the film loses its emphasis. The main plot revolves around a movie being made(film-within-a-film), which is also called Ararat, centered on the Armenian massacre and Raffi is a production assistant for the same. I wish they had shown this movie instead of the real one because then it'd have been easier to empathize with genocide victims. All in all a hodge-podge in the name of a movie.