A joint Armenian-Turkish film telling about life on both sides of the trans-boundary river Arax drew mixed reaction from a Yerevan audience who viewed the film at a crowded Moscow Cinema Tuesday night.
The 30-minute-long semi-documentary, “Arax Banks”, was produced by the Armenian Marketing Association and Turkish-Armenian Business Development Council nongovernmental organizations with assistance from the U.S. embassies in Armenia and Turkey. It attempts to present the opinions about each other of the people, Armenians and Turks, living on the right and left banks of the river separated by a closed border.
In the film the Turkish male character, Araz, and the Armenian female character, Tamar, have a dialogue, deciding to have a reservoir built on the river. Both start to tell each other about their countries and soon learn that they know very little, if anything at all, about each other.
The documentary part of the film presents a vox pop on the streets, among people living in close proximity to the border, who speak only in favor of opening the currently closed border. The film avoids mentioning thorny issues that exist between the two peoples, in particular the Genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century.
“I felt even more humiliated after watching this film. The Turkish character says if we come to their country he will organize a wonderful tour of Western Armenia for us, without even mentioning that it is ours, it was seized from us, there was genocide,” said 60-year-old Karabakh war veteran Aghavni Sahakyan arguing with the film director in the corridor after the film.
The film’s Armenian director Gevorg Nazaryan said that none of the people he talked to spoke about the Armenian Genocide or against the opening of the border. “I am surprised that people do not want to take the nice parts from the film, such as the footage of our ancient ruins.”
While Nazaryan said he saw no political subtext in the documentary, his Turkish coauthor, Serdar Dinler, stressed he hopes the film will have its role in Armenian-Turkish normalization.
Dinler insisted that in his country they learned about the existence of Armenia only in 1992 after Armenia became independent. According to him, they did not even know about the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.
The Turkish film director would not be drawn into saying whether he recognizes the World War I-era killings of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey as genocide or not, but said he lays flowers at the Genocide Memorial in Yerevan every time he visits Armenia.
“But I don’t think that there is a need to concentrate on what happened in the past. I am a man of business and I think that our countries can become friends on economic grounds,” said Dinler.
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