Interview Atom Egoyan

Your colleague Robert Guédiguian must have thought about these issues. For years, he pushed off this
encounter with his roots before filming Armenia (2005).
It’s one of the most difficult challenges for anyone coming out of the diaspora. In Ararat, you can say
that Charles Aznavour more or less embodies Henri Verneuil. Now, remember, Verneuil waited until
he was 70 years old to finally allude to his Armenian roots and the genocide. It was supposed to be
the film of his career. But you can’t say that Mayrig (1991) is a masterpiece. It’s hard because a
project like that almost never lives up to the expectations it provokes. Guédiguian, in my opinion,
was much more successful, particularly thanks to a more direct, generous, accessible narration.
Having just attempted a film in the present, past and future with Ararat – a film that takes on too
much, in my opinion – I felt joy watching Armenia. I had a similar feeling watching Braden King’s Here
(2011), which offers, once again, a really interesting outside point of view. A land-mapping engineer
that explores Armenia to document what remains: such a beautiful idea!
Looking at your trajectory, what’s striking is that your passionate interest today for Armenian culture
came about late in life.
I was born in Egypt and my entire family immigrated to Canada when I was two years old… On my
father’s side, my grand-father and my grand-mother were genocide survivors while my mother’s
family had been living in Egypt for a longer time. But we were never Egyptian citizens. We were
registered, but it wasn’t really an official document. It was only in Canada, in Victoria in British
Colombia, that we finally got real identity papers.
And you first and foremost tried to assimilate to Canadian culture at all costs.
That was my whole life. Until I turned 18. That’s when I arrived in Toronto for school. And when I
discovered at that I didn’t know anything about a whole part of my history. That literally
overwhelmed me.
Until that point there hadn’t been any expression in your family about its origins?
Of course there had been. We had books about painting, in particular. My parents loved painting and
painted in their free time. So I was very aware of my family’s cultural side. What I wasn’t aware of,
was the historical context or the importance of the church.
What clicked for you in Toronto that you suddenly had this thirst to know about your Armenian roots?
At university, the Anglican chaplain, Harold Nahabedian, was actually a converted Armenian priest.
He allowed me to learn everything: to read, to write, to understand the history…
Why didn’t your father manage to fill this role when you were younger?
Because Nahabedian had stayed passionate about Armenia. My father had a different experience.
When he was young, he was lucky enough to study at the Chicago Art Institute. He found himself
surrounded by abstract and impressionist thought. And when he came back, he was shocked by the
feedback from the Armenian community in Cairo: why go so far away to learn to paint like a child?!
After which his relationship with his Armenian roots became complicated. Extremely complicated. In
the ‘70s, he went to Armenia and in front of the monument dedicated to the genocide victims, the
Tsitsernaskaberd in Yerevan, he literally collapsed. He sometimes talks about what happened,
saying it was as if the ghosts of the past overcame him. As if all his years of denial came back to him
with violence. I remember it so well: he returned to Canada completely changed. Now he cries when
he hears, in Ararat, one of the songs that his mother used to sing to him.