“At first I expected that Turks and Armenians would not like the film and the West would like it, but then I realised Turks and Armenians liked the film and the West did not.” These were the words with which Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin addressed the audience before last week's screening of The Cut. The Cut, the first movie by a director with Turkish roots, tells the story of Nazaret Manougian, a young Armenian man who is taken from his family by the Ottomans. He survives the 1915 massacre but most of his family are slaughtered. Everyone is gone except for his twin daughters. Manougian, played by Algerian-French actor Tahar Rahim, embarks on a difficult journey in search of his children. The $21 million movie was first released in August 2014 and was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival. It was released in German theatres in September, screened in london and Paris earlier this month. To a viewer with Armenian roots, many aspects of the movie are unmistakably symbolic. It starts with a light on a map showing Mardin and Ras Al-Ayn, towns in present-day southeastern Turkey near the Syrian border. Nazaret is an Armenian Christian blacksmith who lives in Mardin. He is married to Rachel (the Moroccan singer Hindi Zahra) and they have twin daughters, Lusiné and Arsiné (Dina and Zein Fakhouri). In the first scene, Nazar, as they used to call him, goes to pick up his daughters from school. When their teacher sends them away with their father, she gives him a handkerchief they have made with their names embroidered on it. Nazar admires his daughters' skill and decides to keep the handkerchief close to him at all times. It becomes something he holds onto throughout his journey. The handkerchief becomes torn and faded. Every time he washes it he looks at his daughters' names in needlework, it renews his hopes of finding them. Another symbol is the crane Nazar sees while walking with his daughters and staring at the sky. For Armenians, the crane symbolises immigration, leaving one country for another, coming back with good news for the homeland. One night before they go to bed, Rachel is combing her hair and singing. Suddenly, she stops, and Nazar, who was enjoying her voice, objects, “Why did you stop singing?” She starts again, but it's as if she's already had a premonition: Ottoman gendarmes knock on the door to take Nazaret and his brother, who are forced into slave labour under the burning desert sun and then forced to march to their death, and that of the Armenian nation. That same night, when Nazar puts the twins to bed, he tells them the story of Mount Ararat, a symbol for all Armenians that stands proud on the Turkish border today. Nazar is a person who is very close to God. He goes to church and prays, he says grace at meals, just like the rest of his family. This changes over the course of the movie: like many genocide survivors, he starts to lose faith in God even as his wife's song, an Armenian folk tune, rings through his ears all through his journey, giving him strength and hope. Fatih Akin replays the bloody scenes of murder and rape from one of the most painful tragedies in Armenian history. The Armenian captives who refuse to convert to Islam have their hands tied to each other's before they are forced to kneel. An Ottoman officer gives the order, “Cut!” And so it is. All were beheaded. But Mehmet, the Turkish prisoner assigned the task of slaughtering Nazar, deliberately stops and only wounds him on his neck. Nazar was left mute: he is saved, helped through the desert by Mehmet and other humane Turks who give him food. Nazar sets out to the Ras Al-Ayn camp, where women and children were taken. There he finds his sister-in-law, Ani (Arevig Mardirosian), dying. As he holds her with his arm around her neck, the picture turns grey, as if the colour is draining out of existence itself. “God is not merciful,” she begs him. “End my suffering, Nazar.” Nazar flexes his arm, tightening it. Her suffering ends. It is a common enough trope of the genocide: even a mother will kill her baby to save it from what is worse. At Ras Al-Ayn Nazar finds out that Rachel and his sister were killed but his daughters, he is told, were given to a Bedouin family. On his journey he meets a Syrian soap-maker, Omar (played by the Palestinian actor Makram Khouri), who takes him to Aleppo to work at his factory. A place that ended up in the screenplay as an improvised refugee home for Armenians after WWI. Nazaret spends the next few years visiting orphanages in Syria and Lebanon, until he recognises his now-teenaged girls Lusiné and Arsiné in a photo hanging on the wall of a Beirut orphanage. He is told they were married and have left to Cuba. At every destination, Nazaret is disappointed: Florida, Minneapolis and finally North Dakota. But his wife's song stays with him until he finds Lusiné; by then, Arsiné has died of illness. One interesting message of the film is the warmth and hospitality the genocide survivors received from their Arab neighbours, while the West showed them no mercy at all. Even today the Armenian genocide is all but ignored in the Western world. The film is a courageous effort, couldn't be more timely as we approach the centennial of the Armenian genocide in 2015. The emotional impact it had on this viewer was huge, but by the end of the first hour the horror is already over, and the viewer accompanies Nazar on his journey. The film is 138 minutes long. Not everything is perfect, however. Despite everything Nazar goes through he still looks young at the end of the film, except for a few grey hairs (Rahim, after all, is still 33). His reunion with Lusiné after eight years is — perhaps inevitably — somewhat anticlimactic. The dialogue is mostly in English, but includes Turkish, Arabic and Spanish. Akin was criticised for this: his defence was that he can't speak Armenian and can only direct in a language he understands, a fair enough point. Alexander Hacke's electric guitar music was beautiful, an apt counterpoint to the historical background of the film. The script was co-written by Mardik Mardin, a well-known Armenian Hollywood figure. In an interview with the New York Times last August, Akin revealed that The Cut was originally headed to the Cannes Film Festival, but he pulled the movie at the last minute. His second thoughts were apparently because of what he saw as a more guarded response to his film by Cannes. Venice had responded with much more enthusiasm. “The people in Cannes never rejected the film but I had the feeling that it wasn't what they expected from me, because it is historical, because it's in English, it's not minimalistic. I'm not sure, but I cannot fulfill other people's expectations. I have to fulfill my own,” he said. Akin was born in Hamburg in 1973 to Turkish immigrant parents. His Head On won the Golden Bear award at the 2004 Berlinale. The Edge of Heaven received the Best Screenplay award and was nominated for the Palm d'Or at the 2007 Cannes Festival. Akin was born in Hamburg in 1973 to Turkish immigrant parents. His Head On won the Golden Bear award at the 2004 Berlinale. The Edge of Heaven received the Best Screenplay award and was nominated for the Palm d'Or at the 2007 Cannes Festival. His comedy, Soul Kitchen, received the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2009. Akin had been working on The Cut since 2007. Whether it will ever be screened in Turkey remains to be seen.
