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Ararat
(Original Motion Picture Score)
About
the recently-released film:
The
ever-innovative Egoyan's most personal work yet, Ararat
offers a compelling, multi-layered investigation of the
1915 genocide of his people, the Armenians, by the Turks.
Appreciative of the fact that the majority of his audience
will not be familiar with this terrible episode, Egoyan
interrogates history from the perspective and needs of
the present, threading a number of stories together to
shed different lights on the burden of memory, ideas of
guilt and the possibilities of representation. So, a film
director (Aznavour) attempts to make a period drama from
the material, inspired partly by a biography of Armenian
painter Arshile Gorky, whose writer (Khanjian) is forced
to deal with traumatic family secrets and legacies. Her
teenage film-maker son, meanwhile, is caught in philosophical
conflict with an airport customs guard (Plummer) on his
last night in the job. Moving fluidly and associatively
back and forth in time, and between film set, reconstruction
and contemporary Canada, the film also engages with Egoyan's
ongoing concerns: gender and generational relations, the
limits of technology and the ability of the image to convey
authentic, lived experience. Working with many of his
regular collaborators, he has crafted a resonant and ambitious
document of genuine importance and telling emotional integrity.
Gareth Evans
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