Ooh. Let me take a breath. By the end of this
I was in tears. What a remarkable film. Powerful, profound, tragic, painful
and filled with the evil that men can do to men. We are beasts. We have witnessed
it through history up to the present day. In 1915 the Armenian genocide began.
Over the next few years, the Turks by various methods - death marches, executions,
rape, drowning - murdered about one million Armenians. It was during WWI,
and the Turks saw the Armenians as the enemy within the Ottoman Empire because
they were not Muslim. This is still a touchy subject for the Turkish people
who refuse to admit it happened or they come up with excuses for why it was
necessary. I came across a review of this film from a Turk - it was banned
in Turkey - who called the film a pack of lies that denigrated the great
nation of Turkey. I once had a Turkish friend who told me that two subjects
were off limits for discussion or criticism. Ataturk and the "supposed" genocide.
But there is a mountain of evidence that there was an intentional genocide.
They cleansed out villages - shot the men and drove the women and children
into the Syrian desert where most died of hunger, heat and thirst. They should
just say it is true, the reason why is because we are human and humans at
times do horrible unimaginative things out of hate and fear.
And that is the subject of this film - that
is primarily told in animated form with additional material mixed in of stock
footage, an interview of the subject of the film and bits and pieces of a
1919 silent film. It all makes for a fascinating layered and horrifying story.
Pixar this is not. The director is Inna Sahakyan, a filmmaker from Armenia.
Much of the film is in Armenian with some parts in English. The animation
is remarkable - why is foreign animation so much more inventive than ours?
It is done in watercolors that seem influenced by such artists as Andrew
Wyeth, John Singer Sargent, John Constable and Winslow Homer. The faces are
all distinct and the landscapes stunning. The colors embracing. It is a film
you can immerse yourself simply in the beauty of it but there is a wrenching
story within of survival - survival of a people, of a nation, of a spirit
and of one young girl. It is a true story and all the more powerful for it.
The story of Aurora Mardiganian begins in
Armenia and ends in Hollywood. Once she made it to America, she was taken
under the wing of Harvey Gates who wrote newspaper articles about her story
and then a screen play for a film. She played herself in the film and it
was huge as it and she toured America raising money for Armenian orphans.
At the time, remember that Turkey was on the side of Germany and so not well-liked
by Americans. What the Turks had done to the Armenians was big news. After
the war, Wilson tried to give Armenia its freedom under American protection
but in the end, Armenia fell under Soviet rule till the 1990s when the Soviet
Union fell apart. The silent film was called Auction of Souls and most of
it has been lost. In the 1990s some 20-minutes of it was found and it is
incorporated into this film and looks powerful. Interviews with Aurora shortly
before her death are also interspersed throughout. A feisty old lady to the
end.
It begins when she was fourteen living with
her upper middle-class family in Çemişgezek. Her parents, two
brothers and a few sisters. The father is warned that the Turks were starting
to kill Armenians but he refuses to leave. Not much later soldiers show up
and take the father and oldest son away and execute them. Then the remaining
family is forced to leave their home and begin the death march along with
thousands of others. They are arbitrarily raped by the soldiers, crucified,
starved, shot and kidnapped by bandits. Aurora is kidnapped a few times to
be sold at slave auctions. Brought into a harem one time, kept escaping.
Kept moving on. She had an older brother in America and that was her dream
- to make it to America and reunite with him. Through luck and perseverance,
she does get to America. She survives. Lived till she was 93, got married
and had children and died in California. It is a remarkable story of refusing
to ever give up. Refusing to die. The violence is at times explicit and hard
to watch, animation or not because it was real. Not for children. The
United States finally recognized the Armenian Genocide in 2019.
