1915 The Movie

If it weren't difficult enough to wrap your mind around what was happening on the screen, Marash Girl and her friend Hélène arrived at the theatre 1/2 hour after the film had begun. (Was it the traffic, the weather, or the haunts that already haunted the filmmaker, the theatre, the audience and the screen.)  But then, as an Armenian, it was not so difficult to relate to what, in fact, was happening on the screen -- to fill in the blanks -- to relate to a filmmaker who could not forget the past, to the actress who could not forget the past, to an audience who could not forget the past, to a mob (in the film) outside of the theatre who could not forget the past and could not understand how to deal with the past in the present.

"Take his hand," said the director to his wife, the Armenian actress who was playing the part of an Armenian mother about to die in the desert during the aksoroutioun, the genocide, the mass deportations of the Armenians from their homeland.  "Take his hand," said the director to his wife, the Armenian actress who refused, even though acting, to take the hand of the Turkish soldier who wanted to save her from death.

The only thing that was missing from the film were the words of Marash Girl's father, whose family had survived because of their next door neighbor, the "Good Turk":  "If it weren't for the Turks, not one Armenian would be alive today."