Two movies go to war over the Armenian genocide

The Promise was never going to be a big hit in Turkey, said Raf Sanchez in The Daily Telegraph. No film about the Armenian genocide, even a sweeping big-budget epic starring Hollywood A-listers Christian Bale and Oscar Isaac, can pull off that trick. The genocide – which involved the systematic murder by the Ottoman government of some 1.5 million Christian Armenians between 1915 and 1922 – is accepted as historical fact in most countries. Not in Turkey. There the official line is that it never happened: indeed, it’s actually a crime to discuss it. Yet even taking that into account, the makers of The Promise (which was released in the UK this week) have been aghast at the ferocity of the backlash against their movie. Before it had even come out, more than 50,000 one-star ratings appeared on the film review website IMDB.

Odd then, on the face of it, that another film on the same theme should have just been released. The story of The Ottoman Lieutenant, starring Josh Hartnett and Ben Kingsley, also centres on a love triangle played out against the backdrop of the Great War in Turkey. But unlike The Promise, it’s told from a Turkish perspective and is very careful to avoid any mention of genocide.

And that, in the view of Terry George, director of The Promise, is because The Ottoman Lieutenant was secretly sponsored by the Turkish government in order to undermine his movie, said Jonathan Dean in The Sunday Times – witness the close business ties between one of its producers and Bilal Erdogan, a son of Turkey’s president. George fears that people may now go and see the wrong film by mistake. Let us hope it works the other way round, said Christopher Atamian on The Huffington Post, and that in their desperate attempts to bury The Promise, the Turkish authorities have inadvertently drawn attention to it. Their “denialism” of the genocide has gone on for far too long.