Hani Mustafa speaks to Atom Egoyan, the director celebrated in Cairo's first Canadian Cinema Festival Though described by El-Sayed El-Desouqi, its director, as a forum for Canadian-Egyptian exchange, the first Canadian Cinema Festival, held in Cairo last week, offered only the work of the Armenian- Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan. Screenings were held at the Artistic Creativity Centre, Opera House Grounds, often in the presence of Egoyan, who arrived in Cairo from Germany where he headed the Berlin Film Festival. In this sense the event was a celebration of the director in the city of his birth (Egoyan was born in Cairo in 1960, living in Heliopolis until he emigrated with his family in 1963). With a more expansive programme upcoming rounds of the festival could better serve the purpose of introducing the work of Canadian filmmakers, though for the time being we must be content with a programme featuring only Egoyan, the highlight of which was the screening the director's latest film, Ararat. This opened the festival on 16 February -- it was screened in Cannes, outside the official competition, in 2002. The Sweet Hereafter, which won the special jury award at Cannes in 1997, and Exotica, which won the Cannes critics' award in 1994, were also included in the programme. Ararat would at first sight seem to be about the Armenian holocaust, an initial impression reinforced by the initial titles, displayed against the backdrop of an oil painting of a mother and child that gradually metamorphoses into a sepia tinted photograph of the same figures. Yet Egoyan, rather than undertake any form of documentation, extends instead a complex web of dramatic lines, each of which pursues the fate of one family, weaving a human narrative that is at odds with the opening scene. "The structure of the film is not confusing," Egoyan told Al-Ahram Weekly. "Actually, it is quite clear. But at the beginning you are not sure that these pieces are going to connect. The most complex part is about the relationship between the mother and the step daughter. There are a lot of relationships and each one has to be analysed. If you don't analyse the film it becomes difficult, but if you are willing and curious, it begins to resemble a carpet -- distinct strands woven together." The film opens at a Canadian airport with Edward (played by Armenian-French singer Charles Aznavour) intercepted by the customs officer, David (Christopher Plummer), who objects to Edward entering the country with a pomegranate -- symbol of Armenia -- since it is prohibited to import foodstuffs; Edward responds by eating the pomegranate in front of the officer. Many characters are then presented separately, without Egoyan giving any indication of the connection between them. One dramatic strand concerns Ani, an Armenian- Canadian woman in her 40s (played by Egoyan's wife Arsine Khanjian) and her relationship with her son Raffi (David Alby), from her first marriage, whose relationship with Celia, the daughter of her late (second) husband, is worrying her. This strand of the drama is in itself extremely complex. Ani, an art historian who has written a monograph on the Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky, teaches art history and during lectures on Gorky, who committed suicide in 1948, is confronted by Celia who believes that it was Ani's relationship with her father that drove him to suicide. It is not a plot line that seems integrated with the rest of the film: apart from the link Celia forges between her father's suicide and that of Gorky, who lost his family in the holocaust in 1915, connections with the Armenian tragedy are barely developed. Raffi himself becomes the focus of several dramatic strands, as his step-sister's lover, desperately searching for the reasons why his father should have been killed during an aborted attempt to assassinate a Turkish diplomat. Egoyan's determination to weave a single carpet results in the forcing of connections: Edward, for example, is in Canada to work on a film about the holocaust. He solicits the help of Ani as an expert on Gorky, who witnessed events in Van as a child. Through Ani's intervention Raffi becomes part of the film team, working as a driver and deputy producer. David's son, meanwhile, is a security officer at the art museum where Gorky's double portrait of himself and his mother, based on the photograph in the opening sequence, is exhibited; in one scene he prevents Celia from slashing the painting following a clash with Ani. And David's son's half- Turkish friend, Ali, is cast as the head of the Turkish forces in Edward's film. The intermeshing of so many narrative strands is an attempt by the director to avoid turning what is obviously a film about the genocide into an unmediated piece of propaganda: "I am very aware that if the film just showed the genocide, and showed it for emotional reasons, it would be very easy to say it's propaganda. Now propaganda is simple, repetitive and doesn't generate questions, so I did the opposite. Maybe I went too far in showing that this is not propaganda, that it isn't necessarily the Armenian point of view. I wanted to create a form that would allow the issue to be discussed with some degree of distance, critical distance, but also with an understanding of the reality of living with the issue today. My biggest fear, and the easiest thing that could have happened would have been for the film to be dismissed as propaganda. If you look at the film Aznavour is making you will see what I mean. But having it within the larger setup shows how his generation, the survivors' children who were told such stories by their mothers, might come to see it that way." In seeking to make a film that might transcend both static violence and political statement Egoyan opted to allow the unravelling of the narrative threads non-chronologically. Scenes at the airport serve as an anchor within this complex structuring, as scenes shift from a filmed recreation of events in 1915 to Gorky painting in New York in the 1940s, to the encounters of the contemporary characters as they pass through customs. That between Raffi and David, which occurs midway through the film, is used both as an opportunity to illuminate related aspects of the narrative and as introduction to the eventual denouement. Raffi is holding film canisters that he tells David are exposed and cannot be opened. Their conversation clarifies several points, not least the nature of Raffi's involvement in Edward's project, and allows David a final act of magnanimity on his final day as a customs official. When, later in the film, it is clear that the canisters are full of heroin, David opts to let Raffi walk free, convinced that he did not know what he was carrying. Eschewing melodrama, Egoyan uses Edward's documentary to present historical scenes and though, on occasion, it is made deliberately obvious that the massacres are happening on a set, this does not render them any less harrowing. "I think I wanted to show how four generations interact," Egoyan says, "and even within each generation there are complicated stories. It is very ambitious, but it was necessary for me to tell the story this way. Maybe someone else would have found a simpler way of doing it."
