Atom Egoyan's 2002 film Ararat is a complex work, with many autobiographical and self-referential elements, about an Armenian-Canadian filmmaker making a film about the Armenian Genocide. Widely viewed as a great film, it has also been attacked as powerful propaganda by those who believe that the Armenian Genocide was overblown by anti-Turkish elements and Armenians seeking sympathy, or that it was necessitated by world politics and the behavior of Turkish Armenians.

Despite the accusations of simplistic propagandizing, Egoyan's film does not simply depict the holocaust, but rather depicts the problems of making films about such contentious events. The film depicts the efforts of an Armenian director, Edward Saroyan, to make a Hollywood-style film about the holocaust, complete with a moustache-twirling Turkish villain. Ararat thus includes graphic sequences depicting the horrors of the holocaust, but they are always framed as scenes from Saroyan's film-within-the-film, and the actors and filmmakers are shown discussing the questions raised by the adaptation of contentious subjects into simplistic movies. Saroyan's film is contrasted with evocative camcorder footage of real ruined Armenian churches near Mount Ararat. Egoyan's Ararat thus avoids the simplistic string-pulling good guy-bad guy dynamics of many historical films.

Tagline: In a world full of denial, how do you determine who's telling the truth?

External links

• Official site