(rated R, 115 mins.) Atom “Sweet Hereafter” Egoyan’s stunning new drama gets in touch with his personal roots. The story is about a long forgotten fact: That over a million Armenians were massacred by the Turks in 1915. Living with the unforgotten pain of watching their parents beheaded and murdered, the hate of that generation helps form the fate of the next generation. The title, by the way, is derived from a mountain in Armenia where Noah’s Ark landed. But, anybody up on their history knows Armenia is no longer on the map. Only Turkey remains. Ari (Arsinee Khanjian), an art history professor writes her new book on Armenian painter and massacre survivor Gorky (Simon Abkarian). This book prompts Ari’s son, Raffi (David Alpay) to question his own father’s death during the genocide. In a sub story, film director Edward Saroyan (Charles Aznavour) and screenwriter Ruben (Eric Bogosian) are in Toronto shooting an epic based on the Armenian massacre. They hire Ari as a consultant and her family as part of the crew. Despite multi-layered subplots that follow, at the core is Raffi trying to understand himself, his legacy, and his father, that will include a trip home to modern-day Turkey. There he meets a skeptical customs agent (Christopher Plummer) believing his sealed film canisters contain drugs. The movie is an important tale that teaches this generation, (in modern terms) through the young Raffi, about the genocide. Director Egoyan’s efforts come off as cinematically convincing in an almost intellectual exercise delivered on an educational level that no high school history teacher could have pulled off. The best news, is like the wealthy Jews and their Holocaust, now the poor and overlooked Armenians, finally get their moment to speak out about their own tragedy.
