SPECIAL SCREENING – Robert Guédiguian and the ravages of denial

In Une Histoire de Fou (Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad), the director highlights the impact of the Armenian genocide on the generations who inherited the tragedy and evokes the violence that its denial has fomented throughout the world.

Film still © RR

Born in Marseille to an Armenian father and a German mother, Robert Guédiguian has always addressed the issue of his identity as the sum of several interlaced, determining factors–territorial, religious and even lingusitic–that have had an influence on his Armenian roots. In 2006, the director explored his thoughts on the subject more deeply in the very autobiographical Le Voyage en Arménie (Armenia), in which he reveals his devotion and the duty to remember and transmit.

Robert Guédiguian again highlights this importance in Une Historie de Fou (Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad) by evoking the consequences of hiding the Armenian genocide from succeeding generations. The director fashions the identity of a generation that has attempted to reclaim the history of its ancestors via the specter of vengeance.

Filmed in Marseille, Armenia and Lebanon, the film tells of an unexpected reconciliation between a radicalized young man of Armenian origin from Marseille who blows up a bomb in Paris in the 1980s, and Gilles, a collateral victim of the attack. Robert Guédiguian explains he was seized by the importance of making his own contribution to the debate on identity in France by recalling his own story.

Une Histoire de Fou (Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad) was inspired by La Bomba, an autobiographical account by Spanish journalist José Antonio Gurriarán. As a main supporter of the recognition of the Armenian genocide in Spain, Gurriarán was accidentally wounded in a bombing perpetrated by the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia in Madrid in 1982. After documenting the Armenian cause, he decided to meet the person responsible for the attack and share his ideals.

Benoit Pavan

SCREENINGS

Wednesday 20 May / Soixantième Theatre / 6:45 pm
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