Original subtitles

Kadorian, take one.

The gendarmes came, picked up all the boys

between 5 and 10 years old,

threw us into a pile,

and I happened to be one of the first ones,

and I was at the bottom of the pile.

After they had all the boys in this pile,

they started with their swords and bayonets,

killing us boys,

and one of the bayonets

just hit me in my right cheek here,

and the blood was streaming,

not only the blood from my cheek,

but the blood from those dead boys,

that hot blood coming all over me.

And I couldn't scream, or I couldn't cry,

for fear that they would finish the job

and kill me again.

What is genocide? What does that word mean to you?

Well, it's a legal definition.

It's the, you know, a government or a body

set out deliberately to eliminate a nation,

a tribe, a religious group,

or, you know, a collection of people

in some particular orientation,

who they want to eradicate.

Obviously, the Nazis with the Jews,

the Hutu government with the Tutsi population in Rwanda,

the Khmer Rouge with the Cambodian population,

in Trebinje, it was Bosnian Muslims,

and here in the Ottoman Empire, it was Armenians.

"Let's eradicate the Armenian Nation,

so that it no longer will be a problem

within the Ottoman Empire."

And it's been debated for 100 years by the Turks

that that's not the case, that Talaat Pasha

and the Young Turk government, you know, didn't set out

to eradicate the Armenian population.

But I think there's a strong body of evidence,

certainly by what they did,

to show that that was their intention.

An enormous amount

of what the Turkish government claims

is demonstrable falsehood.

Why they do that, of course, is an interesting question.

Many people are baffled by that, because they think,

"Look, that was 100 years ago.

How are you responsible for this?"

They have had to go through such turmoil

to deny this for a very long time.

Armenians formed a very significant percentage

of the empire 100 years ago.

And now there are only like 0.02% Armenians

left in Turkey today.

Had there not been a genocide,

there probably should have been around 20 million Armenians,

and there are not.

So whatever happened,

obviously they were destroyed one way or the other.

Where should I sit? Is there somewhere we're set to sit?

I have a feeling you should probably sit at the head,

but Terry hasn't said anything.

-Who are you reading, so I know? -I'm reading Lena.

I'm the Turkish widow.

-Okay. -Who are you reading?

I'm Mikael.

I'm Ana.

Oh, of course.

They're very sneaky with their stuff right now.

They have the same PR company that does tobacco industry stuff

and anti-global warming stuff.

And the whole thing is all about sowing the seeds

-that there's a debate. -Right.

They're always pushing this debate idea.

-Yeah, see? There's -- -Oh, great.

-Wow. -Yeah. So it's quite a day.

So, I think -- Guys, thanks, for doing this.

Basically, we're doing this today,

"A," for the reading, to hear how it is,

you know, make me nervous as the director and writer,

and secondly, this is the 100th anniversary,

24th of April, of the start of the genocide,

when the intellectuals in Constantinople were arrested.

There's a scene in the script that references that day.

So we want to start off this movie with on that day

and hopefully tell the story to the world.

Eric Bogosian is going to read the scene description.

Thank you all for coming.

This is the first reading ever

of "The Promise."

Go for it, guys. Okay?

Action.

Exterior. Siroun, Turkey, 1914. Day.

Over a high mountaintop

to an ancient town perched on the side of a hill

in this mountainous Mediterranean region.

Interior, Boghosian Apothecary,

Mikael Boghosian, 30, bookish, handsome,

an ambitious young man,

helps a customer out the door.

"The Promise" is set in the Ottoman Empire

on the eve of the First World War.

It tells the story of Mikael Boghosian,

and his deep desire is to become a doctor.

He can't afford to be a doctor,

and so he decides to become betrothed, as they call it then,

to Miral, the daughter of the local rich merchant,

in order to use the dowry

so that he can go to Constantinople

to go to medical school.

He makes a promise to come back and marry Miral.

It's about one man's encounter with this great horror,

how he deals with that, and how he comes out the other end

and finds his own nobility in challenging this horror.

Constantinople, home to emperors, popes, and sultans,

heart of the Holy Roman Empire and now the Ottoman Empire,

the crossroads of the world.

He disembarks the ferry.

From the earliest days

of interest in the Armenian genocide,

there was interest in making some sort of feature film

that was about what had happened to the Armenians

and particularly when Franz Werfel wrote his book,

"The Forty Days of Musa Dagh," which came out in the 1930s

and was one of the most popular books of the 20th century,

translated in dozens of languages.

"Forty Days of Musa Dagh"

is about an Armenian population

that found itself on top of a big mountain

in the southern part of Turkey, beset from all sides,

and they managed to survive for 40 days,

until finally, they were rescued by a French warship.

Werfel's novel was bought by MGM

to be made into a big Hollywood film.

When the Turkish government learned of this,

they assaulted the U.S. State Department.

Their ambassador at the time was a man named Munir Ertegun,

the father of the famous Ahmet Ertegun,

the founder of Atlantic Records, as an interesting side note.

And Ambassador Ertegun spent a year and a half

cajoling and complaining

and coercing FDR's State Department about this film,

that was just starting in production.

He got on the phone to the State Department

and threatened and got the State Department to call MGM

and get them to disband the effort to make that film.

Turkey even said that not only will they forbid

any MGM film from airing in Turkey,

they'll forbid any American movie

from airing in Turkey.

So eventually, MGM did cower to its interest

and ended the film,

and it never came to light.

There are two ways to get a movie made now

in the 21st century.

You submit a script to Hollywood,

and if it thinks it can make money and attract big stars,

they're going to invest in it, and they're going to pretty much

take it over and tell you what to do.

The other side of filmmaking, which is where I come from,

is independent filmmaking,

where you have a story that you believe in,

and you go out, and you look for independent finance.

I mean, I think we had six or eight different investors

in "Hotel Rwanda."

With this, no one, certainly no one in Hollywood

is going to invest in this subject.

But Kirk Kerkorian, God bless him,

gave us the opportunity to do that

in a way that no one else in Hollywood

or around the world would ever do.

He was born in America, but basically, his parents

escaped the genocide literally just a few years before.

He became one of the great financial characters

of the 20th century. He owned a lot of property

and hotels and so forth in Vegas,

was a great competitor and rival of Howard Hughes.

He bought MGM Studios, sold it again, bought it back.

So he dabbled in a lot of industry,

accumulated a lot of wealth,

but at the same time, never forgot or lost his roots,

that connection to the Armenian community,

and was waiting for this opportunity

to have this film made

and to do something that told the world

about what had taken place to the Armenian people.

This is for the exterior of the church, you know?

-Right. Beautiful. -To put in front of the --

How beautiful. Look at that khachkar.

-Oh, my God. -Yes, you like?

That's like the real thing.

Wow. That is something else.

Will be like marble, you know?

We are building all the left side, you know?

This is the scaffolding.

We build the whole deck.

Are you ready? Are there things you're concerned about?

Are things where they should be?

You know, if you're not concerned

when you're making a movie,

you shouldn't be there.

You should go do something else.

The movies that I did, that everybody turned down,

turned out to be the ones that became the Oscar winners.

You know, whether it's "Rocky" or "Annie Hall"

or "Amadeus"

or "Dances with Wolves" or "Silence,"

I think most people would have told you, "Hey,

it's crazy. Don't do it."

What's the crazy element here on this film?

Well, it's the fact that they've attempted

to basically pretend it never happened

and certainly didn't happen in the way it happened.

I think it's high time, actually,

that the Turkish government recognized

that, you know, by saying what the Germans have done,

which is to say, "Hey, we're sorry.

You know, it did happen.

You know, how do we make amends and try to work through that?"

In that respect, this movie has an enormous importance,

and I don't think it's lost on anybody who's making the movie.

Terry, how are you feeling about things? What's happening?

The calm before the storm or not.

-Yeah. -Calm before the calm.

Yeah. No, it's good. We're on our way to Lisbon

to shoot the first scenes in the movie.

It was obvious we couldn't make it in Turkey.

That was a given.

So it became, where can we make this film?

You know, and there were different ideas of Jordan,

Morocco perhaps, Spain, Portugal,

and Malta had the geography

and the architecture and all that would allow us

to re-create turn-of-the-century Turkey.

So the combination of all those locations

seemed the least difficult.

-From what perspective? -Just the threat

of potential interference or whatever.

You know, it's a politically charged subject,

and we wanted to fly under the radar.

We had virtually no publicity about this at all.

Feel like a queen around here or the Pope.

The pope.

-Hey. -Hey, señor, good morning.

-Break a leg. -Break a leg.

-And break a nose. -Yes. Yes. Yes.

Whatever it takes.

-Happy first day. -Yep.

Ah.

Good morning, sir. How are you?

-Good. -Looks good.

The problem with writing or talking about Armenia

or Turkey and Armenia

is that most people don't have much of a sense

of what is Armenia, or even, what is Turkey,

which, Turkey is an important player in today's politics,

and I don't think most people really even know

what's its history.

Very, very importantly, the Turkish history

is that it was the Ottoman Empire

before it was the Republic of Turkey.

And the Ottoman Empire was around for six centuries,

and it controlled the whole region

that we now think of as the Middle East,

as well as the Balkans.

And all these regions were the Ottoman Empire,

you know, with a sultan, into modern times.

Actually, the Ottomans, the name Ottoman,

comes from Devlet-i Aliyye-i Osman.

It's the dynasty of the Ottoman, house of Osman.

Most of the people that are a part

of that Ottoman ruling elite are Turks,

not the non-Muslims who control much more of the economy.

And as a consequence, ethnic Turks

become the dominant group in Turkey over time.

This gentleman says, you know, "Are you Greek?

Are you Armenian?"

And he says he's Armenian,

and he says, "You have to go to the back."

Right. Everything goes together. Here we go.

-Okay. Are we rolling, guys? -Rolling.

And, action!

Interior, lecture hall, University Medical School. Day.

Semicircular rows of desks rise to the ceiling

in this time-worn classroom.

There is a long foreground to the events

that erupted as genocide against the Armenian people

of Ottoman Turkey in 1915.

Genocidal events don't just happen overnight.

They are brewing, and they're the result

of complex dovetailing cofactors.

The Armenians began to agitate for change,

social and political change in a system

that legally identified all non-Muslims as infidels.

It was a very dangerous thing to do.

It was edgy. They pushed the political envelope,

and they elicited the outrage from the sultan,

Abdul Hamid II,

who was the Caliph

and political ruler of Turkey in the 1890s.

And so for protesting for change and equality,

the Armenians were met with wholesale massacre in the 1890s,

during which time 100,000 to 200,000 Armenians

perished alone,

and that's an extraordinary foreground

to a genocide in 1915.

You can't sit here.

Why?

What are you, Greek or Armenian?

Armenian.

I should have recognized the smell.

Infidels up the back. Go.

If you devalue a minority group for decades and decades,

it becomes a lot easier to turn on them

and to begin to conceptualize them as less than human.

That makes the killing much more palatable.

So, out here, you'll see the Bosphorus.

It doesn't look like that now, but that's why

that scaffolding is going up, and that's what we're trying

to figure out on that uneven ground.

You know, if we could go and shoot in Turkey,

you know, we'd go do that. So short of that,

we're trying to figure out the best way to make it authentic

without breaking that illusion.

And shooting in Turkey for this movie, is that --

Impossible.

Because of the subject or the budget?

I think it's the subject matter primarily

that prevents us from doing that,

and I don't really know if Turkey offers

any incentives for film production.

We didn't really check that out.

This is the party at the Golden Palace.

Lots of extras again, 50-odd extras,

upper class, fashionable people,

Turks, Europeans, generals.

We've got our Germans, musicians.

So it's a very, very busy day for us,

and obviously, Christian's first day.

There's a party scene that happens up here,

and during that party, they are overlooking the Bosphorus Sea

with some German battleships that come in

and fire their cannons.

These are representing the two German battleships

that were given to the Turks during the war,

and they sailed towards the Bosphorus Strait,

which is true history that two German battleships

were given to the Turks in 1914

as a gift because the British commandeered the vessels

that they had paid for,

and the Turks were really angry about that.

So when the Germans gave them the battleships,

it tipped the scales for the Turks

to enter the war on the German side.

Did you see?

German -- German battleships?

-Yes. -Gift for the Turkish Navy,

perfectly -- perfectly innocent gift

from Teutonic...friends

to the Turkish Navy.

Turkey has every right to have a strong navy.

The Empire needs to protect its borders.

Mm, the Ottoman Empire wants its borders

to stretch from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean,

and what these fellas, these Germans,

want your sultan to declare holy war

against the infidel,

the British, French, and the Russian.

This day marked

not only the actual, formal entry into the war,

but it also was when the relationship

between Turkey and Germany was cemented.

Germany was Turkey's ally,

and so that determined their fate

for the rest of time, actually.

What happens in Ottoman history

is that from the 19th century onward,

especially from the 1850s onward,

there isn't a single war that the Ottomans actually win.

From 1856 to 1878,

all the wars that they fight,

they lose major chunks of the Empire.

So the Empire that once spread into central Europe,

into southern Russia,

and all over the Arabian peninsula

and, of course, north Africa,

starts to shrink very dramatically.

During the First World War,

the forces which were controlling the Ottoman Empire,

called the Young Turks,

followed a new ideology that was emerging,

which was Turkish nationalism.

Turkish nationalism was extremely new at the time.

So to understand the genocide, you have to go and study

the mass psychology of this group, the Young Turks,

especially their radical nationalist wing,

which were between two emotions.

One was fear, fear of losing everything,

and the other one was euphoria of a new beginning.

They wanted to build a new empire, a new Turkic empire,

stretching from today's Turkey

up to the Caucasus in central Asia,

uniting all the Turkic people

within a new and marvelous empire.

Here we go! Here we go.

Roll cameras.

Rolling.

The films that I've loved

and have taken lessons from,

obviously "Schindler's List," "The Killing Fields,"

"Reds," which is an amazing film, "Missing"...

...all of these are deeply political films

that tap into emotions.

You know, when you feel pathos, empathy, rage,

pity, sorrow, all of those emotions,

that's what I'm most interested in.

Good.

With this, it's about war fever,

spectacle,

that sense of Constantinople changing

and going into this kind of sectarian, war-mongering mode,

and how the Turks turned on the Armenian population

and the various ethnicities.

This is kind of the start of it.

Yeah?

Bam, bam.

The other one breaks those.

Then you go, bam!

Wait, because he's going hit you and break this on your back.

It's balsa wood.

Should they smash a window

and then go in and drag him out?

Yeah, the door in. Kick the door in.

Oh, kick the door. Yeah, exactly.

-And go in. -And then drag him out,

and the same in the other shop, as well.

-Okay? -Yeah.

Here we go, guys. And roll cameras.

-Rolling! -Rolling!

Here you have this context

of this imploding empire in the Balkans.

Millions of Muslims are fleeing

from slaughtering hordes of Russian Cossacks.

Nationalists are rising up in Armenia and Bulgaria

to demand independence.

You know, this cataclysmic destruction of their world,

of their communities, of their valleys, of their tribes,

and they're all fleeing down towards Anatolia,

what is today Turkey.

-Action! -Action!

And along comes this new ideology,

this virus called nationalism,

that says everybody must have their own homeland,

their own flag, their own anthem, their own motherland.

And the Young Turks bring this

into the core homeland of Anatolia

in the final days of the Ottoman Empire.

The Young Turks are very worried,

especially when they enter World War I,

that the Allies are going to start pushing from the Balkans.

The Russians are going to push from the other side.

The two are going to meet in Asia Minor,

which they decide is the heartland of the Turks,

and then they will totally destroy the Turkish race.

And of course, rather than having that extinction,

they say, "We will do whatever is necessary to sustain,

maintain the Turkish state

and the Turkish race at all costs."

And what is the cost? Who is the other group

that is actually claiming the same lands

as their ancestral lands?

The Armenians.

Okay, they've dragged the guy out.

They're beating the Armenian shopkeeper.

Take a look around the corner and go.

The radical wing of the Young Turks,

they identified the Armenians as the perfect other.

The Armenians were not Turkic.

The Armenians were Christian,

and the Armenians constituted

most of the urban middle classes,

the urban bourgeoisie. And the Young Turks,

they felt that they couldn't compete with them.

In fact, they wanted to take over their social function

by taking over their property and getting rid of them.

Okay. Stop a moment.

Can you quantify the elimination

of a culture like that?

No.

It's very hard to do,

and it's very complicated by the fact

that the Armenians were interwoven

into this very complicated fabric

that was the Ottoman Empire.

The Armenians are people

who've been there for thousands of years.

They were there for a couple of thousand years

before even the Turkic people showed up from central Asia

about 1,000 years ago.

By the fourth century of the Common Era,

Armenians become the first nation

to make Christianity their state religion,

a little bit ahead of Rome.

This is a civilization that has propelled or refined

intellectual and cultural heritage.

The Armenian alphabet itself, to just give you one example,

is one of the most beautiful alphabets in the world,

and the reason why is it was actually designed

to be beautiful. It was designed by artisans,

and it was created to translate the Bible into Armenian.

So Armenians have a very deep, deep, rich, and long history.

It's hard to know what the future would have looked like

had this terrible thing not happened.

With the outbreak of war,

the Turkish ruling elite perceives

that it has a context and a justification

for getting rid of the Armenian population,

the whole Armenian population of Turkey.

It has a context now.

Turkey's at war.

During times of war, as we know,

genocides are more prevalent because societies are mobilized.

They're armed.

There's a lot of focus on sedition and alien behavior.

Security issues trump everything.

The Young Turk ruling triumvirate,

Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and Djemal Pasha,

those three men came to concoct a plan

to eliminate the Armenians

with the war as a kind of screen

and rationale to do so.

The Armenians are traitors.

Their men have flocked to join the Russians, to fight our army.

And thousands of them have joined our army.

And there's another line, Sharif, I want you to add,

that because a lot of Armenians have volunteered,

and the patriarch has advised Armenians

to support the war at that point.

So there's this thing of, like,

"I have a lot of Armenians in my army here.

You know, there may be some traitors,

but we have a lot of loyal subjects."

-Yeah. -All right.

If we get everybody ready, we can set up and rerun it.

It will be about 35, 40 minutes...

-All right. Cool. Good. -...to be ready.

And we may tweak a few lines here and there.

-Yeah. Yeah. -All right.

So, these walls come out, boys, please.

These walls come out.

I am actually the architect,

the engineer of the extermination

of the Armenian people,

and I say it in the lines, "It is absolutely necessary

to eliminate the Armenian nation in its entirety,

so that the very concept of Armenia is extinguished."

This character was actually an advisor to the sultan

and to the government.

He's a real character in the history.

Their goal was,

"We should diminish the number of Armenians

into a level that they should never raise their voice

for their democratic and social rights."

What is this percentage?

They develop a percentage.

5% to 10%.

Those Armenians who should remain in Anatolia,

they should not exceed 5% of Muslim population,

and those Armenians who should be deported to Syria and Iraq,

they should not exceed 10%.

So this is practically to exterminate the cultural,

social, political existence of these people.

This is not the Middle Ages.

We cannot just eliminate an entire nation.

The world will not stand for it.

The Armenians are traitors.

Their men have flocked to join the Russians to fight our army.

And thousands of them have joined our army.

They are an untrustworthy nation.

They say one thing, and they do another.

We will relocate them to the southern deserts.

General, let us go and inform the sultan of our victory.

Gentlemen.

These evacuations are already under way.

We expect your full support.

-Okay, good. One more. -Once again.

Those organizers of Armenian genocide in Istanbul,

they were social Darwinists.

They were social engineers,

and they implemented a perfect demographic policy.

This is one of the reasons of Turkish denial, of course,

because Turkish state was a product

of this demographic engineering.

If you really touch this topic, you will touch

the founding myths of Turkish Republic.

This is something that goes under the skin.

Okay, let's do one more.

Okay, once again. Stand by now.

The Armenian genocide represents

the first case of genocide

committed in a modern modality,

which is to distinguish it from pre-modern genocide,

which is as old as history, of course.

But in this case, we have an example

of a government using its bureaucracy,

its military, its advanced communication and technology,

and an extreme nationalist ideology, Pan-Turkism,

and that defines a landmark moment

in the practice of genocidal mass killing.

A million Armenians were killed

in seven or eight months in 1915,

a million Armenians just in that period.

That was unprecedented in modern history.

We had no example of a million people

being wiped out by a national state apparatus

in such a concentrated period of time.

In 1916, there would be another couple hundred thousand

Armenians mass-killed.

And so we're already saying, perhaps, generally speaking,

about 1.2 million Armenians have been annihilated

by this new, modern practice

of mass killing by the end of 1916.

The genocide starts off and did start off,

was kicked off, on April 24, 1915,

by the arrest of 240 intellectuals

and the kind of fundamental characters

within the Armenian community in Constantinople.

Why do this? Because, this way, the Turkish state

cut the head off of Armenian culture.

It silenced it. It pulled its tongue out.

-Next. -The Ottoman Armenian men

are conscripted into the military...

You have been assigned to the 3rd military division.

...and put into labor battalions

where they were to do scut work on railroads

and latrines and roads.

And they were all eventually killed

by their fellow Ottoman Muslim soldiers.

So, by the spring of 1915, the Turkish government

has already eliminated the able-bodied men

from age 15 to age 50.

Most of them have been wiped out.

Then the Ottoman government used its parliament

to pass two legislative acts,

a temporary law of deportation

giving every provincial governor and mayor

the right to arrest Armenians wholesale

from their homes on the false pretext

that they were somehow seditious, you know?

Whether they were 5-year-old kids playing in the backyard

or 80-year-old grandma cooking in the kitchen,

they were all arrested and then massacred,

most of them, on deportation marches,

which were taking them out of their cities.

And then there was a temporary law of confiscation

and expropriation, which gave legitimacy to the Turkish state

to take over all Armenian wealth.

How many folks are we talking about in there?

The actual carriages, they had about 100 people

that were stuffed into one,

and then they weren't let out for maybe weeks at a time.

They hadn't, you know --

They were not given food and water, so people died.

It was a first example of people being moved

in this way by trains.

These were mainly women, children, and old people.

The Germans were building a railway

to go from Berlin to Baghdad,

and they were building it during the First World War.

So they, of course, wanted arms to be moved

from point A to point B to help them in their war effort,

but the Turks wanted to use the railway for another purpose.

The famous Anatolian railway between Berlin and Baghdad

was used to deport Armenian men, women, and children

from the western areas

down to the center and southeast of Turkey,

where they often found themselves dumped

into the big, vast northeastern Syrian desert

called Deir ez-Zor,

where between 400,000 and 450,000 people perished.

It's been likened to the Auschwitz

of the Armenian genocide.

What role do the German officers play in this?

The Germans were interested in British territory,

the British Empire. They wanted Baghdad

because it was a way to compete with Britain.

And for them, it was a colonial war.

Turkey was their mercenary.

It was territory to be used and exploited.

And it was a good deal.

What they didn't know was that the Turks had another agenda...

...which was this sideshow of the Armenian massacres

to get rid of this minority that was really very inconvenient,

that they'd been wanting to get rid of for a long time,

and now was their chance under the cover of war.

Exterior, train carriage, night.

Mikael leans out looking along the train.

A flash of lightning illuminates a host of arms outstretched,

cupped, trying to catch the precious rain.

-Open the doors. -Save us!

-Help us! -Help us!

Mikael finds a crack in the wooden wall,

peers inside the cattle car jammed with Armenians,

women, children, old men.

Torrential rain is pouring down.

-Please!

One of the really interesting historical angles

that's very understudied in the case of the Armenian genocide

is the German involvement,

which was there in a very, very big way.

And many of the deportation orders

are actually signed by German generals

or German military officers

who then went on to illustrious careers in the Third Reich.

And it's very clear that, in many, many ways,

the German ideas about population control

stemmed partly from their experience

in the Ottoman Empire.

I mean, there is the very famous quote of Hitler's saying,

"Who now remembers the extermination of the Armenians?"

This is just before the invasion of Poland.

One can commit huge crimes against humanity

and get away with it.

That's the lesson he's drawing from the Armenian case.

And it's not a lesson that you want people to be able to draw.

That is a recipe for disaster.

So, maybe if she's laying across like this,

and you go to turn her around to see her,

-then you see what's -- -Well, if I --

-If she's facing that way... -Yeah.

...and you're facing that way --

-Yeah. -She's on her belly.

Yeah, your body's, like, that way.

And then, I notice that it's her, and I bring her here.

And then, I would look down and see that.

-Yeah. -Yeah.

Now, what you can see is that there's blood up here, right?

Well, we see a bit of blood on her face, yeah.

But I think this should be soaked in blood.

Why?

Well, there's a --

Because it's always better for the audience

to presume than what --

-No, but if there's blood -- -We'll put a little bit,

you know? Yeah. We'll put a little bit.

For many people in the world,

this will be their only encounter or reference

for the Armenian genocide, just in the same way

that "Schindler's List" was for the Holocaust,

and "The Killing Fields" for Cambodia

and "Hotel Rwanda" for Rwanda.

So I want to show the full range of the atrocity that took place.

But at the same time, I want to keep it within the context of,

"What's the impact on the participants,

the characters themselves?"

and let the audience feel the horror of it through them.

That's the balance, the tightrope that I walk.

The reality was much more brutal.

-The bodies were stripped. -Far more brutal.

Far -- There was rapes,

bodies that dismembered,

all that stuff, you know?

In reading the testimonies

of those who have seen this happen,

essentially, people were being escorted

by irregulars and Turkish police,

both the gendarmes, the soldiers.

And they really didn't know what was going to happen to them

until the last minute.

They were often taken into a valley or a gorge,

a place where it was difficult to escape.

Turks riding on their horses, encircling people

who had no clue when they were going to be killed.

I mean, maybe they had an inkling,

because word was beginning to spread

that they were going to be massacred.

But, you know, there's always a little bit of hope

that maybe it won't happen to you.

Okay.

How does kids on the set kind of impact things?

These are particularly horrific scenes of massacre,

and so we want to be delicate

in the way we instruct kids

and handle them.

I'll make sure that, you know, nothing hurts.

I'll make sure your head is safe and everything like that.

So you can trust me, and you can really relax, okay?

That's it.

And then, let your arms just relax.

That's it. Let the other one relax.

That's it.

Perfect. Perfect.

And I promise I will not drop you

or let any part of you get hurt, okay?

And then I'll put you down really gently.

Like that.

And that's it. That's it. Okay, man?

Look at that. He's good. Man, you can really --

You do that well.

He does that really well.

Yeah, that's really good.

Look at that. Look at that. Nice one.

Good job, man. Love that.

All right. Here we go.

Here we go, please.

And roll camera!

-Roll camera! -Rolling!

And...action!

It was terrible,

what they did to those Armenians, you know?

It's awful, you know?

Nobody could save them.

People are getting burnt in ditches.

They looked like skeletons

with mothers and children dying together.

It's really bad, sickening, how these people were treated.

Papa?

You have taken the audience into a place

they'll most likely never encounter or even fathom at all.

And you have to do it in a way that, ultimately,

strangely enough, is entertainment.

Nobody is going to pay to go into the cinema

and be in the middle of a slaughter.

How do you find the balance, then?

For me, what I have to do

is find the distillation of this enormous crime.

What are those moments

that are going to take the audience right in there?

When my mother died,

we dragged the body to the dried well.

The other boys just pushed the body,

my mother's body, and ran away.

I stayed there for a few seconds for her to sink down.

Just kept on haunting, that scene,

as to what kind of a son

could one be

to push her mother down

and run away?

It's an experience I wouldn't wish even my worst enemies.

Oh, God!

Oh, no!

Oh, God! Ohh.

It's a very emotional scene.

It is a very emotional scene.

And you keep wondering, "Why?

Why is this happening over and over again?

Why don't we put a stop to it?

Can we stop it? We should be able to stop it."

This took place 100 years ago.

Same thing is happening right now.

Why? You wonder why.

It's an extremely difficult scene.

The story of my granddaughter, Yeva, in the film

is the story of my mother,

who was 4 years old in 1915

when she was in the arms of her mother,

and they were all shot in a group.

And they thought my mother was dead, as well.

And she fell with her mother amongst all the corpses.

And when they thought they had killed everybody and moved away,

my mother got up and...

saw her mother dead,

everybody around her dead,

and she walked off,

ended up in a village.

And she was looked after by a Kurdish family.

If you're Armenian, you grow up

hearing all the stories about the genocide,

about your ancestors,

about the things that they've been through, and --

And all of my ancestors

have been a part of this somehow.

So I guess -- I guess...

I'm the result of orphans who ran away at the time, you know?

Today, we are in Fresno,

which is a small village outside of Madrid,

where we are shooting what we call the hanging village,

which is essentially a destroyed Armenian village

after the Turks have come through.

Chris Myers, our reporter, Christian Bale's character,

stumbles onto that and takes some pictures,

hopefully sends them home to the A.P. to run in the papers.

Mani?

They don't say anything about Allah or God or anything.

It's about, "These acts has sanctioned by the government."

and --

So we did it without any religion --

But what's your reference for it?

Oh, I have it in my computer.

It's from an actual sign?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

-It's a real one. -All right.

We have a number of photographs

that have been circulating around through pre-production

that have given us the basis for all of these locations,

and our hope is to replicate them

in a way that you sort of feel them

without feeling as much as of the horror

as you really get from these photographs.

You know, it's trying to get it out to an audience

but not make it repulsive,

because the events really were, so...

There's a scene in the movie where Christian Bale goes

and attempts to take pictures

of what's happening to the Armenians.

So he becomes aware there's this stuff going on,

and he gets a guy to drive him out there,

and he tries to take pictures.

That's what's happening in the movie.

In the real world, it was forbidden to take pictures

of anything that had to do

with what was happening to the Armenians.

When you were in a train, if you were Germans, for instance,

moving from one part of the country to the other,

the windows were blacked out

so you couldn't take pictures of what was happening outside.

We must leave, sir.

The Turkish government was in contact

with every photo lab in the country.

If anybody brought in any film to be developed,

and it had anything to do with this,

they were to not develop it

and immediately let the government know.

We must leave! Come. We can't be here.

That's why there are almost no photos of what had happened.

There were people trying to take photos.

There were German soldiers taking photos,

particularly Armin Wegner,

whose photos have been published since that time.

I came in Turkey

as a member of the German Red Cross.

I was a witness of the terrible persecution

of the poor Armenian people

and saw the terrible sacrifice.

A witness is a very difficult task.

I could nevermore forget what I have seen.

The Turkish government had a slight problem,

which was that the United States did not declare war on Turkey.

As a result, there were American missionaries

still all over Turkey during this time,

and they were telling people what was happening,

what they were witnessing

and later wrote out first-person memoirs

about what they had seen.

Later, it would be said that, "Well, they were biased,"

or, "They were Christian missionaries."

But the thing is, their stories are too consistent

and too disturbingly consistent to dismiss.

We must leave! Come.

Minister, you are using this so-called relocation

as a cover for the systematic extermination

of the Armenian people.

Ambassador, you're Jewish.

Why are you so concerned about these Armenian Christians?

I am a Jew, and I am an American.

Many Americans have fled persecution,

and they are appalled by what is taking place here.

Very key at this moment was Ambassador Morgenthau,

who was the American Ambassador stationed in Constantinople

and who stayed there because the United States

had not declared war on Turkey.

He began to write about what was happening,

and this began to build and build and build.

And people developed a very strong sense

that there was a coordinated effort

to destroy the Armenian people

within what we call Turkey today.

The coverage of the Armenian massacres

during the World War I period was enormous.

"The New York Times" alone ran 145 articles

on the genocide just in 1915.

At the time, and immediately afterwards,

America was, in many ways,

Armenia's greatest champion.

It sent $116 million in humanitarian aid,

which is about a billion and a half today.

My grandparents, for example, at the dinner table,

always said, "Remember the starving Armenians."

Thousands of American volunteers went to places

like Aleppo, Beirut, throughout the Middle East,

and they administered orphanages and other aid.

And it was a real grassroots effort.

You had people like Rockefellers and the Morgans send money.

But you also had Sunday school children do it.

Proceeds from the Harvard/Yale football game in 1916

went to Armenian charities.

In 1920, Babe Ruth became the first player

to hit 50 home runs,

and the bat he used to hit that 50th home run

was auctioned off for Armenian charities.

The Near East Relief effort was the biggest single

international humanitarian relief effort

that had ever, to that point, been mounted.

And it was the first time the United States had done

such a thing in its history.

You really have America doing this heroic deed

some hundred years ago.

And because of America's policy of not recognizing the genocide,

it has hidden that great moment in American history

where it was so selfless

and really at its best from its own people.

And do they understand what the scene is

that they're actually portraying?

-And she runs away. -Yes.

Right. Here we go.

And roll cameras!

Rolling.

And off they go, guys!

Walking! Off they go!

As far as you could see on the horizon,

you could see these people, Armenians,

with dark, sad eyes,

almost skeletons, walking to their death.

The Turkish soldiers put the sword on her stomach,

and the baby came out of her,

and the mother died there, too, right there.

1915, the deportations started.

Armenians started ending up in Aleppo, Damascus,

and Syria Deir ez-Zor,

Ras al-Ayn, Raqqa, Mosul, today's Iraq.

Camps were established, neighborhoods created.

They were settled in certain cities and towns.

And the Ottoman authorities

monitored the Armenian numbers in a weekly basis.

When they noticed that the number of Armenians

are exceeding the 10% of the indigenous,

they thought they could have killed them on the ways.

And 1916, summer, Ottoman government organized

a second wave of physical extermination,

and they killed more than 200,000 people in summer 1916.

After World War I, the victors of the war

had a great deal of sympathy for the Armenians

and really tried to do them right.

At that time, we have to remember

that Woodrow Wilson arriving in Europe

was this huge shift in American foreign policy.

Suddenly, America became a world player,

and this was one of the first acts

that he did to show how powerful

and how great America could be.

Mostly what they wanted, from a political standpoint,

was to create an Armenian nation

that would be free from further persecution,

to provide for some kind of payment or reparations

to Armenian victims,

and to punish the perpetrators of the genocide.

All of that was memorialized in the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920

between the war's victors and the Ottoman Empire.

There was a whole signing ceremony.

The Armenians were there.

The war's victors were there.

The Ottoman delegates were there.

But that treaty was never enforced

in part because, at the time, the sultan,

who was sort of the figurehead running the empire,

actually didn't have de facto rule over his own country.

In the fall of 1922, Sultan Muhammad VI,

whose family has reigned for seven centuries,

fears for his life and goes into exile

as crowds cheer his going.

Mustafa Kemal's victorious army enters Istanbul.

You have Ataturk rising up

in the central and eastern part of the empire,

and a lot of his popularity was due to the fact

that he was going to fight the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres,

especially the territorial terms,

which would have carved up Turkey

into a much smaller country.

First President of the First Turkish Republic,

Mustafa Kemal, during the 1920s,

keeps his limitless wartime powers

and his command of the army,

makes the hard, dry town of Ankara his capital.

His fantastic dream is not of empire or conquest

but of creating a democratic Turkey,

a new kind of Turk in his lifetime.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk became one of the major generals

of the Ottoman Empire along with Enver and Djemal,

and he couldn't get along with them

because he obviously had his own vision and ideas.

So he was, like, exiled to the east, away from action,

and that's why he was able to survive

and not be stained by the genocide, so to speak.

He wasn't directly involved in it.

And that, of course, helped him later on

when he started the independence struggle,

because he was chosen to lead the independence movement

specifically because he wasn't involved

in the Armenian genocide.

Ataturk kind of dares the Allies of the war and says,

"Look, you have this treaty,

but if you're going to enforce it,

you're going to have to start a new war."

Woodrow Wilson had proposed an American mandate over Armenia,

where United States would send troops and advisors

and kind of watch over this small fledgling country.

And the Senate rejected that.

While the rest of the European Powers

were carving out all these mandates

from the remains of the Ottoman Empire for economic reasons,

Woodrow Wilson came back with this incredibly altruistic idea

that America would support Armenia on moral grounds.

Congress just went,

"You came back from the Paris peace conference,

and this is all you brought, a mandate for Armenia?

Like, you know, what about the oil?

What about all the resources

that the rest of the world is sharing?"

By 1923, they enter into a new treaty with Turkey,

and it's called the Treaty of Lausanne,

which is signed in Switzerland.

And that treaty has none of the same terms

when it comes to the Armenians that the Treaty of Sèvres did.

There are no talks of reparations.

There's certainly no talk of punishing the perpetrators

or transferring Turkish territory to Armenians.

And that treaty is also the birth of modern-day Turkey.

It no longer is the Ottoman Empire

and instead becomes the Turkish Republic.

The world is anxious to restore

good diplomatic relations with Turkey.

From the United States comes Ambassador Joseph Clark Grew.

For this revolution and high accomplishment,

one man is primarily responsible.

The name of Gazi Mustafa Kemal will forever be associated

with the development, founding of the new modern Turkish state

and will forever be inscribed

indelibly upon the rolls of history.

The Turkish nation is democratic by nature.

I have no doubt that the American nation,

which has gone so far in this ideal,

is Turkey's friend in her aims.

This will not be all. Perhaps it can lead

to a world of love, with all old prejudices erased,

with all nations coexisting in peace and prosperity.

Ataturk was a very smart guy,

and he learned how to be strategically very valuable,

especially as the Soviet Union became more and more powerful,

very valuable to the West.

We have to remember that, at the end of the First World War,

the holdings of the former Ottoman Empire

were extraordinary.

I mean, the new world hadn't seen anything like this

since the discovery of gold in South America.

The oil reserves were just so massive.

Ataturk was able to help the West have access to those fields

in return for certain issues not being dealt with,

and one of those was the question

of the Armenian genocide,

that the Armenian genocide basically went away.

It's around this time that we start to see the history books

getting turned inside out, first of all,

by changing the whole language

so nobody could read any old documents.

They went from a sort of Arabic script to a modern,

more Western script, changing place names.

I went through the Turkish educational system.

According to all the Turkish history books,

everybody, like, victimized the Turks,

and the Turks didn't do violence to anybody.

I mean, as a consequence,

anyone who goes through the Turkish educational system

has no idea about what happened in the past

and what the Turkish state and its predecessor,

the Ottoman Empire,

was capable of and had done.

Now, Ataturk himself was not a participant

in the Armenian genocide,

but many of the people who flocked to the Turkish flag

were involved in it, and there's another aspect here,

and that is that a lot of the property of the Armenians

who were expelled or murdered

was given to refugees from the Balkan Wars

who were Muslims and came into Anatolia.

So there was a big property transfer,

and that become the basis

of the Turkish middle and upper classes.

If you discuss the history

from the perspective of genocide,

you could see, without deportation,

without killing of Armenians,

you couldn't be able to establish this republic.

It goes contrary to the founding legends of the republic.

The Turkish republic today owes its own existence

to the extermination of Armenian people.

This makes the issue difficult.

Tell me where we are. This is a new location.

A new location. We are in La Cabrera,

which is about 45 minutes outside Madrid in the mountains.

We're shooting today the exit of the village of Basek,

which is one of our imaginary villages

that stands in for four or five villages

around the mountain of Musa Dagh.

This is the scene when our small group of orphans

and Mikael and Ana

are traveling to Basek to try and get in a boat to escape.

What they find is a large group of 1,000 or so refugees

who are heading up Musa Dagh,

because Basek has been abandoned essentially by the Armenians.

You know, it's the third act of the film.

We're re-creating another true event,

a very heroic and historic event for the Armenian people

and a story that's tried to be told several times on film

and been blocked, sometimes by the Turkish government

and by intimidation.

All right. Let's wait.

Let's wait until they start moving.

-Don't move the drone yet. -Don't move. Don't move.

Don't move. Just wait for this guy to start moving,

and then we can move.

Musa Dagh was one of the few places in the Ottoman Empire

that Armenians were not slaughtered en masse

because they figured out that the genocide was happening,

whereas most Armenians were not aware

of what was happening to them. They were told things like,

"Oh, you're being deported for your own safety,

and you'll be back once the war ends," and things like that.

So people kind of -- They didn't resist.

Musa Dagh was one of the few places

where there was some resistance.

The fact that they went on top of this small mountain

really allowed them to be able to pull it off.

And eventually, they were saved by a French Naval ship.

And this become the basis of Franz Werfel's novel,

"The Forty Days of Musa Dagh."

Now, Terry, how would you like possibly just starting out here

with a big, wide tableau like that to start it off?

The light's fading. We all know it's going to be dark

in a minute, and it's the mad 10 minutes before we wrap, yes.

And, of course, this is our biggest shot of the day.

Everything we have on set is in this shot today, so 200 extras,

probably about 30-odd horses, goats, chickens,

donkeys, cows,

our principals.

Everything we have on this location

is in this shot now coming up, 10 minutes.

Why did you wait till the end of the day?

Because that's what we do.

-That's what we do. -Yeah.

All right. Come on, guys. Let's go.

In shutting down the production

of "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,"

MGM, that was the first example

where Turkey not only re-created its own history

where it removed the genocide

and, in fact, removed the Armenians from its own history,

but now it was trying to extend this narrative,

this false narrative to other parts of the world.

Now, because this issue kind of laid dormant until the mid-'60s,

you don't see Turkey doing much of this again

until the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and beyond.

And by then, it becomes a very sophisticated apparatus.

And, Luis, we'll go with the cart as it rides out here.

We'll stay at this height.

That's good until I tell you to come up here.

Beautiful. Beautiful.

So, tell me about that initial silence by Armenians.

You know, why?

After World War I and after Armenia

is swallowed up by the Soviet Union,

Armenians are dispersed across the world in this diaspora,

and they can't really incubate political power

'cause they're so few, and they're rebuilding.

So when it came to the genocide,

Armenians had this public silence

that lasted for about 50 years.

Genocide is a new word,

combining the Greek word "genos," meaning race or group,

with the root of the Latin "cidere," meaning to kill.

Dr. Raphael Lemkin is the man who created the word genocide

and really has fought this thing from long, long ago.

Dr. Lemkin, could you give us a little background

on how you came to be interested

in this genocide fight originally?

Gladly, Mr. Howe.

I become interested in genocide

because it happened so many times.

It happened to the Armenians, and after the Armenians

got a very rough deal at the Versailles Conference,

because there are criminals

who are guilty of genocide who are not punished.

So you see, as a lawyer,

I thought that crime should not be punished by the victims

but should be punished by a court, by international law.

The great Polish-Jewish legal scholar and lawyer,

Raphael Lemkin, developed the concept of genocide

as a crime in international law,

and he did so largely on the basis

of what happened to the Armenians in 1915

and what happened to the Jews in Europe

under Nazism in the 1940s.

The United Nations General Assembly proclaimed genocide

a crime under the Law of Nations.

One by one, the representatives of 21 nations

signed this new document,

called the International Convention

for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.

After the Second World War

when the Holocaust was recognized as such,

Armenians mobilized once again around this idea

that Turkey should equally recognize the crime it did.

The 50th anniversary of the genocide

was a little bit of a magic number.

People start to talk about, "Hey, are we going to do

something to reawaken this event from its dormancy?"

And a lot of Armenians at the time thought,

"If we don't do it now, on the 50th anniversary,

it will be forgotten forever."

This created a new dynamic,

pushing for a decade of struggle

through political means, peaceful means,

demanding Turkey to recognize the genocide

and demanding also to give back

Armenian territories occupied as a result.

The Turkish government knows very well

that, in the Treaty of Sèvres,

that Armenia was awarded a larger piece of land

that would be, today,

part of northeastern Turkey

with an outlet to the Black Sea.

The decade of peaceful struggle

did not reach any results,

and in 1975, we have Armenian militants

carrying out violent attacks against Turkish diplomats.

Armenian terrorists targeted people

in the Turkish Foreign Ministry.

Those are the very people who are in charge

of this campaign of denial.

So you have this period of terrorism

that does bring a lot of publicity,

because, unfortunately, the media listens

when there's violence.

But it also made Turkey even more energized

in fighting Armenian efforts for justice.

If you have had the experience of violence

that was never acknowledged,

you cannot heal.

The wound is open for the Armenian

because, in order for someone to grieve

and come to terms with the trauma,

it has to be acknowledged in the first place,

whereas it's been 100 years,

but of course, that time can never lapse.

Because of the lack of acknowledgment,

you do not allow those people to move on.

I feel like there should be a shot here,

but there's not a shot here yet, for me, anyway,

'cause there's so much stuff around,

but I think there will be one.

I'm terrible at being patient.

And what is a shot to you?

Basically, I got an e-mail from one of the producers

saying, "We're doing this movie. We've been thinking about

bringing in a conflict photographer

to photograph this as if it were real..."

-And action! Go!

"...and to give a different, broader angle on the story

than just the kind of Mikael-Ana-Chris triangle."

No, I don't actually think that,

because so many of the people who are involved in this,

this is their story, too,

and so this is not just a movie

for a lot of the people involved in making this movie.

This is a cause.

This is a passion.

This is a story that they've, in some cases,

either been wanting to see or wanting to tell

their entire lives.

-Vanadzor, Lori. -I knew you were from Vanadzor,

-but -- -I'm from Vanadzor.

When Turks occupied Vanadzor,

they said, in Turkish,

they couldn't get into our city,

so they call it Gharakilisa.

It means "black stone."

So they call it black because they couldn't get in.

There was a lot of killing.

So I'm proud where I'm from.

There are a lot of Armenians in photojournalism,

and maybe this is over-thinking things a little bit,

but it's this kind of need to provide evidence,

this need to document things that are happening,

because we all grew up with this denial.

I don't remember learning about the genocide.

I feel like I always knew about the genocide.

I do remember the moment where I realized

that genocide denial was a real thing.

I had written my sixth or seventh grade history report

on the Armenian genocide, and my teacher said,

"That never happened. You made that up."

There were meetings in school, and it was a lot of drama.

But I think that need to be believed,

that need to teach people,

I think that may have something to do

with why so many of us are photojournalists.

You know, I think we're kind of over-represented

for the size of our actual population

in photography.

This is the thing that every Armenian child is instilled with

is the fact that, if we don't talk about it,

if we're not obstreperous

and if we're not prepared to actually keep this issue alive,

there is absolute no reason

why the rest of the world would remember it.

Genocide is ultimately about erasure,

and denial is a way of sealing that erasure.

Did you cast me just because I'm half-Turkish?

No.

It's because I thought you would be perfect for the part.

But being Turkish didn't hurt.

Ah, didn't hurt, no.

You know, you never asked me what I thought of the history.

What is there to think?

Well, do I believe it happened, a genocide?

-Well, I'm not sure it matters. -No --

I was aware that a film had attempted to be made

on "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh."

MGM had commissioned a script

and that they were about to go into production.

I think Rouben Mamoulian was going to direct it,

and then it was shut down by the State Department.

I felt that my film, "Ararat," could be made in Canada

and that we wouldn't have resistance, but we did, in fact.

There was a very pointed meeting right before production

where a representative of the Turkish community in Canada

wanted a meeting with the producer, Robert Lantos,

and myself and my wife, Arsinée Khanjian.

And we all got together in this conference room,

and he basically made the most extraordinary threat,

which was if we made the film,

he said he couldn't guarantee

that the Armenian community in Turkey

wouldn't feel the effects of it.

And our jaws just dropped,

and we all looked at each other and went, "Is that a threat?"

I mean, that just seemed -- It seemed so egregious

that this person would ask for this meeting

and then come up with this threat, you know?

And Robert, you know, responded and said, "Well, you know,

there's nothing that you can do

to stop this film from being made.

It's being made. We're going ahead with this."

And, you know, the meeting was over,

but I then began to receive, like, hundreds of letters.

A retired general from the Turkish Army,

a lawyer from Istanbul, a Consular,

another retired colonel from the Turkish Army.

And they're all exactly the same.

Basically, they're saying that I'm harming the interests

of the country I'm living in and indeed the interests

of Armenians in Armenia, Turkey, and various places in the world

by making this film.

And then, to top it all off --

-This is before production? -This is before production.

And then this book came out,

which is called "Ararat Master Propaganda Work."

And the theory of this work, which is in Turkish,

but another version exists in English,

which was sent to, like,

Turkish embassies all over the world

so the diplomats could actually brace themselves

for what was about to come out.

Basically, it's an analysis of my career up to this point,

the box office of my various films,

various things that have been said about my movies,

how the Academy Award nominations

for the "Sweet Hereafter" were part of this plan.

And it's a theory that this film,

in fact, perhaps my whole career,

is part of this covert plan by the Armenian community

as a alternate form of terrorism.

It was cultural terrorism,

in fact, art-film terrorism.

So this came out at the same time

that we were being threatened.

I had received a couple of death notices.

And then, of course, I mean, this all culminated when --

The film was distributed in 40 countries.

We weren't expecting that it would find distribution

in Turkey, but a very brave distributor did take it on.

And then the Gray Wolves, this ultra-nationalist group,

threatened to bomb any theaters that were showing the film,

so it was pulled from theatrical distribution.

Look, I never heard about any of this stuff

when I was growing up, you know?

I did some research for the part.

From what I read, there were deportations, and...

lots of people died, Armenians and Turks.

It was World War I.

Turkey wasn't at war with the Armenians,

I mean, just like Germany wasn't at war with the Jews.

They were citizens. They were expecting to be protected.

Even talking about it now, 15 years after I made the film,

I just feel this sense of...it's so improbable,

and yet it's been a huge part of every Armenian's upbringing,

that you're dealing with this dark, menacing force

of denialist mentality.

You know, the fact that you have to explain it,

the fact that you have to position it

is so enraging,

and yet it's part of our condition,

and I think it makes us feel unusual.

It makes us somewhat deformed as a people.

-How do you mean? -Because we have to defend

the most essential part of our own history

against a perpetrator that continues to deny,

that continues to put massive amounts of money

into actively denying this.

And it's actually a miracle that our voices come out at all

given the resources of this government

to systematically suppress this

and to try and say that this could not have happened.

Retroactive.

So it's -- Even the Pope has been making a mistake

saying that it's genocide.

Can I just see it one more time? No one's looking.

So what does this book say, basically?

Anti-genocide?

And what do they say? What do the Turks say?

Or what does this book say?

It's okay.

Yes, yes, yes, of course. I mean, look, everyone --

That's what the Ambassador and this book say?

Says that what the Armenians --

The Armenian rebels were killing Muslims?

Yeah.

Yeah. But don't you think,

because the Ambassador gave you this book,

they have an agenda?

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

There's an enormous amount of pressure on everybody

to present this story

as something that is open to discussion or possibly untrue.

There are not two sides to every story.

Stories are much more complex.

There are multiple perspectives and opinions and views.

That doesn't mean that they're all true.

Tell me about how the pressure

from the Turkish government impacted your film.

Only pressure I've ever felt from the Turkish government

directly is what they've done to PBS,

and, you know, they've attacked it at several different levels.

There were about 10 congressmen, senators,

I'm not sure of whose names those were,

because this was not made public,

who told PBS to drop my show completely.

When PBS aired my film, they decided

to have a panel discussion after the film

where they had several people on the panel,

Tonir Akhjan, Peter Balakian,

a man from Turkey who I don't know,

and a historian named Justin McCarthy,

who is the most vocal American professor

who speaks out that the genocide didn't happen.

This is really propaganda masquerading as history.

It is true that the Armenians suffered terribly.

The difficulty is, by only presenting half of a story,

by only showing you the Armenian dead,

they make it appear like a genocide.

The Armenians did suffer terribly,

but the Muslims, the Turks, and the Kurds,

they suffered equally as badly.

And by skipping that, by not putting that in,

they have made what was actually closer to a civil war

or perhaps a mutual genocide

appear like a slaughter of one group by another.

This movie, unfortunately -- This program, unfortunately,

is historically extremely inaccurate.

If you're dealing, for example,

with something like denial or revisionism,

you can give voices to these people,

but you need to give them context

and sort of quarantine them,

because, otherwise, you allow that doubt to grow

in the mind of the viewer. You plant this little seed

that, well, maybe it didn't happen.

And then the next time someone says,

"You know, I heard about the Armenian genocide,"

"Oh, yeah, I heard about that, too, but wasn't that --

There's something. It was controversial, right?

Like, maybe it happened. Maybe it didn't happen."

And right there, the story has been damaged.

You don't say, "Oh, the Holocaust."

"Oh, yeah, the Holocaust. Wait. Did the Holocaust --

Are you sure the Holocaust happened?"

That's not part of the narrative.

That's not part of the conversation,

but it is with the genocide.

PBS' response to the accusations was,

"Well, we believe the genocide is settled history,

but we wanted to have this conversation,

because it shows you the complexity of the issue."

Not only has Turkey been able to create an environment

where those who speak publicly view it

as something just too difficult a mountain to overcome,

but Turkey has also damaged the story,

so either they don't report on it at all,

or they do report on it in a dishonest way.

Being a more broad-based historian

who's written many books but just being labeled a denier,

I mean, how does that make you feel?

Nobody likes having enemies.

Nobody likes receiving threats by e-mail or by mail.

And no one likes especially when they --

In years gone by, they would threaten families

and things like that.

As a historian, the thing that bothers me the most is

when people won't talk,

when they simply use terms like "genocide denier" to say,

"We won't deal with him because he is this,"

and then they say, "No, forget it.

We don't ever listen to him."

I'd like to see a real debate that goes on.

What is genocide?

It's a legal term in legal international law.

It's based on the Genocide Convention of 1948

that was approved by the United Nations.

The Convention stresses the element of intent.

The Armenian position is that the Ottoman government

sought to destroy the Armenian people

and used the war situation to accomplish this goal.

The evidence I've examined does not support

that thesis.

Everyone had known that many Armenians

and other Christian groups

had died in World War I,

and we didn't really think much about

what happened to the Muslims.

Partly, that's due to just a Western prejudice, I'm afraid.

People just didn't think about the Muslims.

I found that almost 3 million Muslims, most of them Turks,

had also died in World War I.

What we have here is a shared pain

of both Armenians and Turks.

How would you describe the Muslim pain or the Turkish pain?

Well, the Muslim pain, I would say, is much deeper and greater.

I don't want two different pains to compete,

who suffered the most,

but because they lost the huge empire,

and Armenian issue is very much the end game

of that massive ethnic cleansing of Muslims

from the Balkans and the Caucasus.

Basically, everyone killed everyone.

It was a horrible, inhuman time

in which all sides killed all the other sides.

Armenians had a revolutionary movement

that had been active for several decades.

When war broke out, they made common cause with the Russians

who were invading over the Caucasus.

A major ethnic cleansing of Muslims

carried out by Russian and Armenian troops.

The Turks decided to relocate and deport

the Armenians from the areas where fighting was going on

so that the revolutionaries were not of any support.

It was what demographers call forced migration of --

The exact number is about around 600,000 Armenians.

The Armenians with money were allowed to buy tickets

on the Baghdad Railroad,

so they were spared some of the worst aspects

of the deportation.

The worst suffering of Armenians

wasn't in the area the Ottomans relocated them.

It was where they lived with the Russians,

where up to 50% of them died.

Many Armenians died of disease, hunger.

Most of the Armenians were butchered by Kurdish tribes,

and some of the Armenians were also killed

by Ottoman government officials.

But the legal description of the suffering

should not be the term genocide.

A civil war within an international war.

A war of mutual extermination.

There is a term called pogrom.

One might call what happened to Armenians as pogrom.

It has become kind of a question of identity,

I think, for the Armenians.

I would call it holocaust envy.

People who believe that if they make enough trouble,

Turkey will give them the eastern provinces of Turkey,

which they call Armenia.

These are nationalists that have their agenda.

The Turks do not want to cheapen the term genocide.

According to international law,

there are only three genocides --

Holocaust, Rwanda, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

There are no fourth genocide.

So, when you hear these arguments refuting the genocide,

-what do you think? -It's --

Well, there's an aspect of further blaming the victim.

There's an aspect of trying to wash the whole thing

within the World War as they, you know --

Look, if it wasn't for the Nuremberg trials,

we might still be talking about this

having to do with the Holocaust, as well,

because that was during the World War.

They could have said, "It was war. People died, you know?

They tried to revolt in the ghettos in Warsaw,

and, you know, so we had to go into Poland."

Like, they could -- Any kind of excuse can be made, right?

But the truth is, they're all excuses.

Many of the Turkish officials say,

"A lot of people died, but it was during war."

But then, these aren't soldiers fighting.

I mean, you have to separate the soldiers who die

from the civilians who die.

Even if you looked at the genocide as being provoked

by some kind of, you know, fifth column

who were seen to be, you know, betrayers of the Turks,

even if you believe that,

you couldn't explain the Armenian genocide,

because the Armenian genocide was getting rid of everybody,

not just Armenians who were in the areas bordering Russia.

It was Armenians through the entire empire

who were being killed.

The Turk's here, and then he shoots him.

Okay? He should be closer in by now.

Were there certain revolts in certain areas

because the Army was coming,

and they knew that people were being killed

and taken to the desert? Fuck, yeah,

and there should've been more.

But that doesn't mean that it wasn't a genocide.

Exterior, lower encampment, Musa Dagh, dawn.

A fog has blown in from the sea,

and Turkish soldiers appear from among the trees.

You don't run after someone for 100 years

for them to just turn around and go, "Fine. I did it. What?"

You know, it's not just about them admitting it.

It's about justice. We want justice.

Surrender these weapons.

Come down, or we will kill you all.

All we ask is to live in peace here.

If you're a victim of genocide,

how can there be healing without acknowledgment?

If you don't respect me, if you don't want to listen my story,

and you tell me you only recognize what happened

as a genocide, that is not going to end

in a reconciliation or in a peace.

The Republic of Turkey will not agree

or consider 1915 as genocide

because it is going to make Armenia comfortable and happy.

We can only come together

if we both recognize each other

as a moral human being

and then recognize our shortcomings

and then create a shared understanding

what took place in 1915.

The killing of the memory of the event

is a double killing.

Many of us in the genocide studies field

have said the denial of genocide is the final stage of genocide,

because it seeks to demonize the victims

and rehabilitate the perpetrators.

In 2005, the International Association of Genocide Scholars

issued an open letter to the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan

and in that letter, the Association outlined

the irrefutable evidence

on the Armenian Genocide

over the past hundred years.

It's an extraordinarily destructive, emotionally

and psychologically wounding, reality

for an Armenian community worldwide,

10 million people, to have to deal with the assault

of the perpetrator regime's legacy a century later.

In fact, look. It's one of the most extreme

situations of its kind.

To have an entire nation live in an alternative universe,

you know, and denying the genocide is almost like

an entire nation denying that man was on the moon.

Everybody knows it happened.

It's time for Turkey to acknowledge this.

If they're calling on the West to support Bosnian Muslims

against Serbian genocide in the '90s,

then they should begin by recognizing

that their precursor empire, the Ottomans,

carried out genocide.

And nothing infuriates me more than being in a crowd of Turks

and hearing them suddenly start talking about

the "so-called genocide," soezde soykirim.

I breathe fire. It was a Soykirim,

a genocide with a capital S. For all I know,

I could be banned from going to Turkey for saying that.

You know, if you're in Turkey,

and you're using the word "soykirim,"

that's dangerous.

Basically, if you give a talk in Turkey or elsewhere,

people look to see whether you're using

the word "genocide" or not.

If you use the word genocide, Turks stop listening to you.

If you don't use the word genocide,

Armenians stop listening to you.

So, for a while, I said, "I'm not going to use the word,

because I want people to listen to what I have to say."

But then it was the assassination of Hrant Dink,

who was a good friend of mine and a colleague, in 2007.

After that, I said, "All bets are off.

I am calling it what it is."

For eight decades,

the struggle for the recognition of the Armenian genocide

was mainly taking place in diaspora communities --

in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq, in Europe, in France,

especially in North America.

In Turkey, Armenians didn't have a voice,

and the first Armenian which claimed a place

in the Turkish public space was Hrant Dink.

Hrant Dink established "Agos" newspaper.

It is the first important newspaper that published news

in both Turkish and Armenian.

What he did was to address his discourse

to the average Turkish citizen.

He said, "Brother, sister, let me talk to you.

There were Armenians living here before.

There are the ruins of a school, of a church, of a monastery.

What happened to them? Where did they go?"

And by doing that, he was touching the taboos

of the Turkish republic.

And afterwards, he was invited to the office

of the governor of Istanbul province.

And during that meeting, the governor was not there.

The deputy was there, and there were two other people present.

They didn't identify. They didn't tell who they were,

but probably, they represented the secret services.

They said, "You know, what you did was very bad.

You shouldn't touch those wounds.

You shouldn't talk about the past like this.

Maybe someone will be irritated and come and kill you

while you are walking down the street."

I did have talks with him, and I said,

"Look, things are not looking good.

Why don't you come to the United States

and stay here, away from Turkey for a while?"

He said

"I feel like a fish out of water outside of Turkey."

And in a way, I think he shamed all of us

with his love for his ancestral lands

that he wanted to be there.

For that, he got shot in the head

by a young activist

who was later photographed in Turkish police stations,

flanked by the Turkish policemen

who had allegedly gone and captured him.

For me, Hrant is like a biblical figure.

He's the perfect sacrifice.

The moment he was killed, he managed to pass his message

to the entire Turkish population,

because, for the first time, nearly 100 years later,

100,000 Turkish citizens went to the streets

calling, "We are all Armenians. We are all Hrant Dink."

And by this, the Armenian question

became part of the struggle

for democracy and pluralism in Turkey.

So Hrant succeeded in passing his message,

and the price for that was his life.

The trial is still, all these years later,

still going on,

and there are all kinds of shadowy figures.

They know who was the trigger man,

but they don't know who set up this assassination.

Nine years and no justice.

It's exactly the same.

Again, here is a violence that has been committed,

in this case against one person,

but nevertheless, it is very symbolic as to who he was.

And the perpetrators are, once again,

not held accountable for the violence they committed.

I served the United States loyally for all these years,

and rarely did I have a moment

when I disagreed with U.S. policy.

There were some, but it was only in my last assignment,

when I was sent out as Ambassador to Armenia,

that I came to grips

with an issue that was so monstrous

that I found myself disobeying the policy of my own government,

which was not something I ever wanted to do,

set out to do, or had any pleasure in doing.

Six months into my assignment,

I was invited back to the United States

to talk to various centers of Armenian population.

And in Watertown, Massachusetts, somebody asked me,

"Why is it that I have no uncles or aunts,

and I don't know who my grandparents were?

How can that be?"

Well this put me into a terrible, terrible dilemma,

because, after all, the U.S. Ambassador is charged

with carrying out the policy of his government.

But the U.S. government, out of deference

to our NATO ally, Turkey, had a --

I wouldn't call it even a policy --

It was a taboo, an utter and complete taboo

on saying or much less doing anything

about this historical event.

Do I spin this question,

or so evade the question

that it's deeply misleading,

or do I break the taboo, which I knew existed,

and try to talk about it, and deal with the consequences?

-And your response? -Well, I said,

"Yes, I believe it was a genocide."

After I returned to Armenia, the first day I got back,

there was a telegram from Condoleezza Rice

on my desk, two telegrams, in fact --

one giving me the text of the apology

that I would now proceed to issue

and put on the website,

and the other actually having me apologize

to the State Department and explain my action.

I'm surprised that you apologized for that.

I had no choice. I was ordered to issue this apology.

Now, in the other telegram back to the State Department,

I did not apologize on the substance of the matter.

And what was the response?

The response was roughly this --

"You are the U.S. Ambassador,

and even if you're sitting in the bathroom,

what you say has to be U.S. policy."

It was a little more lurid than that,

but that was basically it.

I think the failure of the U.S. government

to simply acknowledge the total ethical reality

of the Armenian Genocide

does represent a very sad act of cowardice.

From the outside, if you ask yourself

how the most powerful country in the world

can cave on an ethical issue of this kind,

you do find it quite astonishing.

For those of you who aren't aware,

there was a genocide that did take place

against the Armenian people.

It is one of the situations

where we have seen a constant denial

on the part of the Turkish government

and others that this occurred.

It has become a sore spot diplomatically.

Whether it was President Obama,

President Clinton, or the first President Bush,

all of them, before they became president,

said that they would acknowledge the Armenian Genocide.

But once they became president,

they realized the pressure that's put on this country

to not use that term.

So, essentially, Turkey is able to censor

the most powerful person

not just in this country but in the world.

If you look at a map, it all becomes very clear

what Turkey is.

Turkey's listening posts and its Air Force bases and so forth

are right there, butt up against --

I mean, anytime you want to send anything into Russia

or into Afghanistan or down into Iraq or Iran,

you've got Turkey there to launch things.

Turkey has incredible geopolitical leverage

over Europe and over the United States

and, in fact, as far as I can see,

at no time more so than right now.

Europe is shaking in its boots

worrying about the flow of refugees

from Syria through Turkey

and is desperate for Turkey to help control that situation.

And as long as they have that kind of power,

they can basically exact any terms that they want.

A moral argument should never be trumped

by geopolitical concerns, you know?

Something like a genocide should never be negotiated,

should never be political capital for anyone,

because it takes us down to a level beyond humanity.

How important was it for you to put Musa Dagh in this story?

You know, talking about the genocide

didn't necessarily have to have Musa Dagh.

Similar to "Hotel Rwanda," you want a story

that focuses on the human spirit

and endurance and good against evil

and the capacity of man to stand up to that.

And I think Musa Dagh certainly encapsulates that.

And just in dramatic story terms,

it was obvious to me that you had to show

it wasn't just people getting marched

into the desert and slaughtered.

People stood up against it and triumphed.

As you come up over this hill, this is the bowl here.

This is your last refuge, and in between those two peaks

-is the Mediterranean Sea. -I see.

We're going to put the sea in there.

I see.

If a nation does not face its own history,

it cannot be a democratic society.

Turkish government persecuted its own intellectuals,

because United States supports them.

Turkish government denies the Armenian Genocide

and persecutes the individual like myself and the others

because they are counting on the support

of United States government.

And United States makes a big mistake

regarding its own interests, its own security policy.

If you ask me, if you want to understand Yugoslavia,

if you want to understand Rwanda,

if you want to understand any other mass atrocities

what is happening today,

you should really look into the Armenian Genocide, also.

You will see a microcosmos of genocide

in that area in that time.

Without facing history,

without acknowledging historic wrongdoings,

there cannot be stability in the region.

The main problem in the Middle East is the trust.

History is not in the past.

Past is not past in the Middle East.

Past is the present.

The Arabs, the Kurds, the Armenians,

they are all looking from the window of history

towards each other.

They still consider Turks

as the murderers of 1915.

As long as Turkey does not acknowledge

its role in the past,

you cannot get stability in the region.

So, Joe, how are you feeling your last day in Madrid now?

That's a wrap. That's a wrap today.

That's a wrap.

All right, guys. Help the work, boys, please, behind me.

-All right. We are rehearsing.

So, tell me what's happening today in particular,

which is the last time I get to ask you what's happening today.

This is...

Ana and Mikael have made love in the Armenian hotel,

and she's coming back to sort things out with Chris.

He's sending a telegraph report to New York

about the death march and the atrocities he's seen.

All right. Here we go. And roll cameras.

And action.

"A young child tried to pull her to her feet,

and as she lay on that dirt road,

a Turkish calvary man rode up and dispatched her

with a single shot." Write it.

Write it.

So, what do you think the Turkish government

is going to say when your movie comes out?

Clearly, they're not going to agree with it.

You know, they haven't -- There's been nothing

that has shaken them from this notion that,

"Oh, this wasn't a genocide. Bad things happen to everyone."

I mean, they can barely admit that,

but no admission that there was governmental planning for this

or orders or so forth.

We have to beg nations

to recognize genocide.

I lost 11 members of my family,

and I have to beg people to believe me.

That's what hurts you most.

-Mr. Myers, New York is waiting. -Ana.

We must go, Chris.

-Ana! -Mr. Myers, New York.

We will lose the connection.

"Armenian men are being slaughtered in their villages.

Their women and children are being driven into the desert

to be murdered!"

Send that!

The Turkish soldiers, they took our clothing.

They took our jewelry.

They robbed us. They killed us.

They raped the women.

I still have some nightmares to this day.

Okay, cut!

These guys are too --

How do you feel about being the guy

who's bringing the story to the world

that's been so oft repressed?

You know, it's a frightening challenge.

The onus of telling that story

and particularly with the Armenian diaspora

around the world and what that will mean to them

and opening up the debate about this

and hopefully putting to bed this whole thing of,

"Did a genocide happen or not?"

I mean, the soul of the whole Armenian nation

is burnt by this.

And so, yeah, I hope we've pulled it off.

How close to the end are you?

Oh, so close. Moments away.

We are. Moments. Seconds, in fact.

Hey!

What we've done together here is a historic thing.

People will go back and look at this movie and say,

"This is what happened in 1915 and 1916 in Turkey."

And we've tried with all honesty to tell that story.

Kirk Kerkorian was unwavering

in his desire to make this film.

He would be so proud right now, day 72 of 72, that we wrapped,

and it's better than we ever imagined.

This was not an easy road,

but we're all a part of it,

every single one of you.

Go and tell the story.

Tell the story to the rest of the world.

You form a family when you make a movie.

And I am so deeply grateful. And I love youse all.

Thank you.

It's very, very sad.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I just can't go on anymore.