VENICE: The race for the Golden Lion in Venice took a dark turn yesterday with stories of war and genocide including an ambitious tale that has drawn death threats for German-Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin.
The mass murder of Armenians by the Ottomans in 1915 is the theme of Akin’s latest film The Cut — a hugely controversial subject particularly in Turkey and one that has sparked a violent reaction from extremist groups.
“I had seven or eight years to prepare myself for the reaction to the film, it’s something I’m not surprised by. For art it’s worth to die,” he told journalists in English in Venice, adding that he tries “not to take it too seriously”. In the film an Armenian blacksmith (played by French actor Tahar Rahim) is separated from his wife and two young children in what is present-day Turkey when the Ottomans join the First World War, and he is called up for military service.
When bandits attack his group of conscripts, the blacksmith is the only survivor. One of the aggressors stabs him in the neck rather than slitting his throat, leaving him alive but mute, with his vocal chords severed.
As the years pass he becomes obsessed with finding his daughters and sets off on a quest which sees him treck through Syria, Lebanon and America. Up against The Cut for Venice’s top prize is Far From Men, a tale of honour and friendship set at the start of the Algerian war of independence.
The film, inspired by Albert Camus’s short story The Guest, stars Viggo Mortensen of Lord of the Rings fame as an Algerian-born, French-speaking schoolteacher who puts his own safety at risk to defend and protect an Arab farmer accused of murder. French director David Oelhoffen’s movie is less a depiction of the bloody uprising than an exploration of existential questions posed by Camus, played out on a hostile and isolated terrain far from the reaches of the law.
AFP
