The mass murder in 1915 by the Ottomans of the minority Armenian population is still a hugely controversial subject, especially in Turkey where there is resistance to assuming a retrospective burden of genocidal shame. Fatih Akin has made it the starting-point for his first English-language movie. It’s a big, ambitious, continent-spanning piece of work, concerned to show the Armenian horror was absorbed into the bloodstream of immigrant-descended population in the United States. The embattled hero Nazareth is torn from his wife and twin daughters by the Ottoman authorities for a supposed military conscription which is nothing more than a forced march heading to racial annihilation. But he encounters decent Turks: a civilian prisoner who pretends to cut his throat at the orders of a soldier, but merely stabs him in the neck, leaving Nazareth alive but mute. Nazareth scrambles away, an undead fugitive from history, and becomes obsessed with one thing: finding his daughters, a mission which will take him on a journey of thousands of miles. PB
Section: PanoramaD: Fatih Akin
G: Fatih Akin, Mardik Martin
F: Rainer Klausmann
E: Andrew Bird
DA: Allan Starski
S: Jean-Paul Mugel
M: Alexander Hacke
P: Fatih Akin, Karl Baumgartner, Reinhard Brundig
CP: Bombero International
Tahar Rahim, Simon Abkarian, Makram J. Khoury, Hindi Zahra, Kevork Malikian
The Match Factory. Sergi Steegmann T +49 30 4431 9050
E sergi.steegmann@matchfactory.de W the-match-factory.com
FB TheCutDerFilm TW @thematchfactory
The son of Turkish parents, he was born in 1973 in Hamburg. He studied Visual Communication at the Hamburg School of Fine Arts. He won a Golden Bear for Head On in 2004 and was awarded at Cannes for the film The Edge of Heaven (2007; Bafici ‘08). In 2009 he released Soul Kitchen and won the Special Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
05 May 2015
25 April 2015
25 April 2015
