'Ararat': When history still hurts

Ararat, a politically explosive film that has been compared to Midnight Express, premieres today at the Cannes film festival, despite a threat from the Turkish government to take legal action on its first public showing. The feature film is the latest work from Atom Egoyan, Canada's best-known film-maker, and in part deals with the controversial genocide of Armenian civilians living in the Ottoman Empire. They were massacred between 1915 and 1918 under the regime of the Committee of Union and Progress, led by Enver, Talaat and Jamal Pashas, more widely known as the "Young Turks".

Earlier this year, at a meeting chaired by the Turkish Deputy Prime Minister, entitled "Commission against false genocide accusations", a decision was taken to utilise all the resources of Turkey's culture and foreign ministries to prevent the movie's opening. In attendance were senior officials from the Turkish National Security Council and MIT (the Turkish secret service), officials from the ministries of foreign and internal affairs, and the chairman of the Institution of Turkish History. Similar measures were taken in 1978 against Alan Parker's movie Midnight Express, which displayed Turkey's legal and prison systems in an unfavourable light.

The story behind Ararat began innocently enough. Atom Egoyan was born in Cairo to Armenian parents and emigrated to Canada as a young child. His parents never spoke of their traumatic history. In 1998, Egoyan read my biography of the Armenian artist Arshile Gorky and was deeply moved by the story of a boy who had fought in the siege of Van, seen his mother starve to death, emigrated to the United States, and rose to fame as one of the leading artists of the New York School. Though tempted to film the book he decided that historical films were not his genre. Instead he produced a screenplay that wove a carpet of interconnected modern stories that radiated from the life and the shocking suicide of Arshile Gorky,

In Egoyan's scenario an Armenian woman, Ani (played by Egoyan's wife Arsinee Khanjian) has written a biography of Arshile Gorky, which she reads aloud in an art gallery. A veteran Armenian film director, (played by Charles Aznavour), decides to include the story in the epic historical movie he is currently shooting about the American Missionary Dr Ussher (played by Bruce Greenwood) at the heroic siege of Van. The film within a film highlights the plasticity of memory as the characters propelled by their "true remembrances" link and pivot around the central theme. Several actors play two parts, their historical role in the epic and their character in the modern story.

Ararat is eagerly awaited by Armenians across the world, whose large diaspora of more than five million, outnumbering the current population of Armenia, was created by the genocide of 1915-1918 that displaced 1.5 million Armenians from their homelands. Turkish governments still deny these organised deportations and killings. Hitler himself said: "Who today remembers the Armenians?"

Yet the tide has turned and the European Parliament, Italy, Belgium, Argentina, France, Switzerland, have all recently passed legislation acknowledging the Armenian genocide. The film's namesake, Mount Ararat, the resting place of Noah's Ark, has symbolised Armenia for centuries. But it was captured by Turkey in 1918 and as it rears over modern day Erevan, the capital of Armenia, it is seen as a prisoner by Armenians. In the Soviet era its name was censored from poetry as too "nationalistic". Like the names of Armenian towns and villages it has been renamed by Turkey.

Considerable venom has been unleashed upon the film. Several episodes in the film, based on the testimony by Armenians witnesses, have enraged the Turks. These include a shot of severed heads mounted on pikes and a group of young brides being made to dance while they are doused with kerosenes and burned.

Egoyan says that Ararat, "my most personal and important piece of work", is a work of art, not a documentary and should not be politicised. Turkish groups in Canada lobbied the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in an attempt to prevent the film being broadcast in the country. A vast e-mail campaign was launched in the US at its backers and distributors, Miramax and Disney.

Recently the backlash seems to have toned down as Erhan Ogut, the Turkish ambassador to Canada has stated: "Of course there is artistic freedom, there is freedom of expression. We are as respectful of that as anyone else. So there's no question of attempting to take legal action against the film." However, he added that individual groups, not the Turkish government, might take "justifiable action" afterwards. Turkey in its turn will start shooting its own film, describing the "violences" of Armenian and Russian army in Van and Kars in 1915-1919 – although Armenia had no army before April 1918.

The documented historic evidence of the Armenian Genocide has been scrupulously assembled from Turkish and German, as well as British, US and other sources. Last month I visited the desert of Deir-ez-Zor in the killing fields, caves and rivers where a million Armenians perished. I was shown a piece of land that keeps subsiding. It is called the Place of the Armenians. So many thousands of bodies were buried there that the ground has been sinking for the last 80 years. Human thigh bones and ribs come to the surface.

In the shrine to the victims there are photographs taken by German soldiers. One was a row of severed Armenian heads with Turkish soldiers swaggering beside them.

For Atom Egoyan, Ararat means that he has finally confronted his Armenian family's own history, breaking their silence. On 24 April the day on which Armenians commemorate the genocide, Atom Egoyan made this statement about the film.

"On this day of all days, I have to affirm that this is an indisputable piece of history. I cannot tolerate the attempt to diminish the scale of this atrocity... I'm not going to put myself in a position where that is an open question."

Last month Egoyan decided not to enter Ararat for competition at Cannes. "This film is dealing with a period of history that has never been represented before on film," said the Director. "The idea of subjecting that to the additional pressures of a jury – given all the pressures that are on this film already – seemed to be unnecessary."

Many Turkish people maintain that they would be best served by a government that would bring their country in line with nations who have no need to hide their skeletons in the cupboard. By insisting on justice the Turkish people would gain immeasurably in the eyes of the world. If art can hold up a mirror to reality, then Ararat presents a moral challenge for Turkey to scale. It remains to be seen whether it is strong enough to dare.

'Ararat' will open in the UK later this year