Ararat.2

Ararat does a masterful job at tying together several themes that deal with both the national level and the personal level. It's also incredibly meta.

Basically, the film is about a director who is making a film about Armenia, in order to remember what happened there and communicate that memory to others. The introduces the question of truth and fiction, as the director takes poetic license. He also interacts with one of the actors, who is Turkish, and denies the genocide. The director's interaction with this actor is one of forgiveness--he buys him a bottle of champagne for his work in the film. The director intimates that hating back the people who hated you is not an appropriate solution. Religion is a theme that recurs quietly in the film--how do religious differences affect conflict?

An art historian who is a consultant on the making of the film has written a book about Gorky, the Armenian painter. Her complicated relationship with her son, his girlfriend (who is her step-daughter) and her two dead husbands mirrors Gorky's relationship to his mother and father. Her son goes to Armenia to tell his own story--to make sense of his father's death. When he returns, he is stopped in customs. He tells his story in many iterations to the customs officer. It is in this process of story telling and retelling that the truth comes out of layers of fiction.

Ararat deals with complex, but interrelated, themes. (Stearns called it "ambitious," which is fair.) Through the story of the Armenian genocide, it deals with the need for memory, as well as forgiveness, both personally and as a nation. It also points to the way in which fiction can carry truth, sometimes more accurately than the truth can.