Ararat

Released 2001
Stars Joaquin Phoenix, Ed Harris, Scott Glenn, Anna Paquin, Elizabeth McGovern, Michael Pena, Leon Robinson, Dean Stockwell
Directed by Gregor Jordan

Ararat bears witness to the mass genocide of the Armenian people by the Ottoman Turks during World War I. Chronicling the life of an Armenian-American artist named Gorky who survived the slaughter, the film takes pains to point out that the Turks committed a crime of the same magnitude as Rwanda, Bosnia and the Holocaust -- and that denying this fact is a terrible stain on humanity.

Summary from www.netflix.com

This movie is a mess. It's obviously an angry, personal film by Atom Egoyan, and I don't know why he chose to tell it in such a convoluted manner. Parts of it are very successful, but the pieces don't add up. I liked the movie within a movie that seamlessly segued into flashbacks, but what was the deal with Raffi sleeping with his step-sister? I liked the device of Christopher Plummer's character interrogating Raffi, but I didn't like the drug trafficking aspect. Also, why did the step-sister have the vendetta against her step-mother? All of the extraneous elements may have had symbolic meaning to the Turkish massacre of the Armenians, but to get the symbolism you have to understand the history. I had never heard of the genocide, so the symbolism was lost me. The worst part of all of these extra threads is that it doesn't make the viewer really care about this awful event. I will say this, though. While the movie is unsuccessful in making us care about the genocide, it is successful in making us aware of it. --Bill Alward, February 27, 2004