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Giving the 
victims a voice

German-Turkish director Fatih Akin has made a film about the Armenian genocide.

23.10.2014
© picture-alliance/abaca - Fatih Akin

Bleak social milieu studies, romances, documentaries, comedies, road movies, thrillers – and now a politically 
explosive historical melodrama. The portfolio of German-Turkish film director, screenwriter and producer Fatih 
Akin is wide-ranging. With his new film The Cut, he has now broached a subject that is taboo in Turkey: the Armenian genocide at the beginning of the 20th century. The Cut is about the young Armenian blacksmith Nazaret Manoogian, who is deported by the Turkish gendarmerie. He survives the genocide but his vocal cords are severed, rendering him dumb. He sets out to search for his family all the same. His journey takes him across the entire globe, from the deserts of Mesopotamia to Havana to the barren, lonely prairies of North Dakota.

The film is international in terms of both its locations and its making: it’s a German-French-Italian-Canadian-Polish-Russian-Turkish co-production. The Cut drew a lot of 
early attention in September 2014 at the Venice Film Festival, where it was given its first public screening.

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