By Alex Deleon
ISRAELI Director Amos GITAI is noted for making thought provolking Films
Both the German genocide of Jews in World War II and the heinous genocide of the Armenians in Turkey during World War I will be represented in new films by top international filmmakers at the upcoming 71st Venice Film Festival.
Ace Israeli film director Amis GITAI (63) will present "TSILI" a feature film based on a novel written in Hebrew but shot completely in Yiddish, the language that was actually spoken by the doomed Jews in Europe at the time. This will, says Canadian producer Sam Tesjhman -/ be the first feature film in Yiddish in sixty years! The Yiddish language is moribund but not yet dead, and he was able to find actors able to perform in Yiddish in Israel and Canada, one of them his own son.
Although Aaron Appelfeld, the author of the novel, "Tzili, the story of a life", is himself a Holocaust survivor and a native speaker of Yiddish, he chose to write it in Hebrew for contemporary Israeli readers unfamiliar with the language of their parents and grandparents.
Director Gitai, always a stickler for unvarnished reality in his films, decided against all odds, to shoot it in Yiddish, because this is the actual language the characters of the story would have been speaking at the time -- not Hebrew! It will be interesting to see how this goes down at the prestigious Venice festival
Fatih Akin (39) Hamburg based German Director of Turkish descent will present a film dealing with the Turkish Genocide of the Armenians in 1915. In Turkey itself it continues to be a serious crime to make any public mention of the Armrnian Genocide or even to refer to it obliquely -- "An Insult to Turkish Honor" is the legal rationalization invoked.
Award winning director ("Against The Wall" Golden Bear Berlin, 2004) Fatih Akin’s latest film, “The Cut,” will premiere at the 71st Venice International Film Festival taking place from Aug. 27 to Sept. 6. “The Cut” tells the story of an Armenian man, Nazareth Manoogian, who after surviving the Genocide learns that his twin daughters may be alive, and goes on a quest to find them. Nazareth’s ü takes him from his village Mardin to the deserts, to Cuba and finally North Dakota. Nazareth, who is a mute, is played by Turkish actor Tahar Rahim. The film was made in English, with a running time of 138 minutes, but the version that will premiere in Venice is dubbed into German.
That a Turkish filmmaker chooses to defy the Turkish establishment on the highly sensitive Armenian issue is in itself News, but Fatih Akin is noted for Addressing himself to subjects considered too hot to handle by filmmakers back home where Islamicist reactionary Recip Erdogan was just reelected to another five year presidential reign.