Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #233886 in DVD
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: Armenian, English, French, German
• Subtitled in: English
• Running time: 115 minutes

Amazon.com
This remarkable, intricate movie from Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter) centers around the making of a film about the genocide of Armenians in Turkey in 1915--but this is not a dry, didactic historical re-enactment. Ararat unspools multiple storylines around Ani (Arsinee Khanjian), an art historian hired as a consultant on the film; her son Raffi (David Alpay); his stepsister, with whom Raffi is in love even though she believes that his mother is responsible for her father's suicide; an actor (Elias Koteas) hired to play the Turkish officer who organized the genocide; and a customs officer (Christopher Plummer), who holds Raffi for questioning under suspicion of smuggling heroin. All these characters, combined with the movie within the movie, intertwine in a complex yet powerfully emotional examination of memory (both cultural and personal), loyalty (to one's family, to one's heritage), creativity, and the subjectivity of truth. --Bret Fetzer

From The New Yorker
A complicated, not to say confusing, movie from Atom Egoyan. His subject is the massacre of the Armenians in 1915-a matter of abiding pain and significance to those of Armenian descent, such as the director himself. He approaches the problem from different angles: there is a historical epic, then the story of how that epic itself was cast and shot, then a delving into the lives of its performers, and so forth. There is even a long, implausible interview between a customs inspector (Christopher Plummer) and a young Armenian (David Alpay) who has just arrived in Canada; as the subplots ramify, we watch the effect of the genocide-as it is unequivocally called by its victims-on lives both close and distant. The trouble is that you can feel the history being used as much as examined; what is required, not least for American audiences, is an unerring clarity, and what they get is a stylish, near-numbing deadpan of mystification. With Bruce Greenwood and Charles Aznavour, who gives every sign of being immortal. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Very demanding and serious movie
If you're into typical hollywood movies (action, sex, violence) this is not the movie for you...go watch the James Bond flick instead. There is one sex scene, some violence and a rape scene. The movie is not perfect (I thought the sex scene was not necessary), but it makes up for the shortcomings in many other ways.

It is a very thought-provoking, multi-dimensional movie about one of the most horrific crimes of the 20th century, the Armenian Genocide....beware that you can't blink or you'll miss a plot or two. This film is not a documentary about the Armenian Genocide. It is about the modern day lives of people that are impacted by the genocide (denial). I don't think this will do any justice in teaching about the Genocide to people that don't know much about it. The current politics of the denial are concealed in the many sub-plots throughout the movie.

I watched the film last night and I'm still thinking about it and analyzing it with others. There are too many stories and plots in this film. I'm going to watch it again to get a grasp of everything that was happening.

do you know what still hurts?
an armenian friend called me two weekends ago and invited me to see 'ararat'. he warned me that the movie's subject is genocide. although this isn't something i usually venture into the theaters for - i tend to use hollywood to escape reality - i went anyhow...

this is the third egoyan movie i have seen in a theater - exotica was my first, the sweet hereafter was my second. each was a unique experience and i truly can say cannot be compared to ararat.

ararat is a MOVIE about a HISTORICAL event validated by scholars, historians, eyewitnesses from the united states, england, france, germany, russia, etc. and even turkey. there is no doubt that the armenian genocide took place. the exact circumstances, motivations, numbers murdered, etc. are questioned - true. but the fact remains that a planned genocide by the turks against the armenians took place and this movie chronicles some of the horride eyewitness stories. the one i can still see when i close my eyes is the rape scene...

now... i read the other reviews that were posted here before i went to type mine. i have to say that the reviews written against ararat were obviously politically motivated and seemingly anti-armenian. it is juvenile bickering at its best...

do you know what still hurts? the hatred.

see the movie. stop the animosity. begin the healing. enrich your knowledge of world history.

Haunting Scenes
The question, of course, is how you approach a topic as vastly horrific as the Armenian Genocide without leaving your audience overwhelmed and numb. The answer is that you tell another story against the backdrop of the unfathomable horrors, thereby giving your audience just enough of a hint of the horrors without drowning them in it.

Spielberg pulled off this device pretty well in "Schindler's List". You see the ovens of Auschwitz, but not the people actually burned in them. You see the piles of bodies, but not them being slaughtered.

In "Ararat" they tell the story of the making of a film about the Armenian Genocide, and inside that is the story of an Armenian American artist named Gorky who survived those horrors. Placing the scenes of mass murder, gang rape, and atrocity upon atrocity as a film-within-a-film provides enough emotional space to make these horrors psychologically manageable.

While the film is very, very good, I'm not sure that the director pulled off the trick completely. I think his missed the mark of greatness. The subplots got a little busy and soap-opera-ish, in my opinion.

There was an unrelated suicide, something about a terrorist attack. Apparently some statement on gay rights. Quasi-incest. Heroin smuggling. I dunno. I didn't see the point in all of that.

The story of the gay son of the customs agent and his Turkish Canadian lover was over the top, out of place. Was the intent seriously to compare the plight of a middle class gay couple in Toronto in 2001 to the horrors of Lake Van in 1915? I hope not, for that would be the worst sort of blasphemy.

Also the story of the young Armenian Canadian protaganist and his semi-incestuous relationship with his step-sister was just bizarre. What was the point of that? There was also a story of his unwiting smuggling heroin from Turkey and how this somehow helped the father of the young gay man (lover of the Turkish actor) accept his lifestyle. Maybe the director was saying that we get only homosexuality and drugs from Turkey, but I don't know. I think that some of this should have been cut, for detracting from the main point.

Some of the dialogue got a bit didactic, with the characters delivering tendentious lectures on Armenian history.

But, that's all nitpicking. Taken as a whole, this is a fine film and one that will stay with me the rest of my life. It makes the point that the Turks committed a crime of the same type as Rwanda, Bosnia, and yes, the Holocaust, and that denying this fact is a terrible stain on humanity.

The fact that Israel officially denies any comparison of the Holocuast to the Armenian Genocide and is apparently working behind the scenes through its strong connections with the American film industry to limit the showing of this film on behalf of its strange bedfellow Turkey constitutes, in my opinion, one of the slimiest sellouts of basic human values in recent memory.

God is Just, and He won't forget. Let Tel Aviv tremble.

Anyway, go out and see this film. Buy a copy, and pass it along to your friends. This is a painful historical truth, the denial of which makes liars of us all and ultimately places us all in jeapardy.