YEREVAN, JULY 13, ARMENPRESS. French-Armenian film director, actor, screenwriter and producer Robert Guédiguian’s  movie “Crazy Story” will be screened in France in November and in other countries in the next year. Robert Guédiguian informed this in a meeting with journalists on July 13. The movie reflects upon the topic of the Armenian Genocide. The screening of that very movie marked the opening of the 12th international film festival “Golden Apricot.” 

Guédiguian said that he wanted to produce a film on the Armenian Genocide for quite a while. He particularly noted that the Armenian’s story becomes the story of the entire humanity in the movie. He added that the movie was screened only in Cannes and has not yet been screened in other places.  

The movie begins with a black-and-white preface, describing the assassination of Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman minister who initiated the Armenian Genocide, by Soghomon Tehlirian in Berlin in 1921. The film then abruptly cuts to the year of 1981 and the Armenian diaspora in Marseilles where a storekeeper called Hovannes (Simon Abkarian, from Army of Crime), his wife Anouch (Ariane Ascaride, Guédiguian’s wife and regular collaborator), and hotheaded son Aram (Syrus Shahidi) live.

Soon Aram finds himself clutching a detonator, waiting to blow up the car of the Turkish ambassador to France. As Aram is about to push the button, a cyclist suddenly pulls up behind the ambassador’s car. Aram makes the choice to set off the bomb anyway. The cyclist, called Gilles, is not killed, but is injured and requires months of operations. Aram disappears to Beirut. Anouch tracks Gilles down and offers him the family’s help. Gilles takes up the offer; after practically moving into Aram’s old bedroom, he starts to identify with the Armenian cause. Vendetta in mind, Gilles wants to battle with Aram’s family. Instead, he finds a long-lasting hospitality there. Aram quarrels with his friends in Beirut before one day he decides to meet his victim with the intention to make him his representative…

Robert Jules Guédiguian is a film director, actor, screenwriter and producer. Most of his films star Ariane Ascaride and Jean-Pierre Darroussin. Guédiguian is the son of a German mother and an Armenian father. He evokes his paternal roots in his 2006 film Le Voyage en Armenie. He has a working-class background - his father is a worker on the Marseille docks. He became concerned with political questions and for a while was involved with the French Communist Party. In 2008 he joined the Left Party. Like Marcel Pagnol and René Allio before him, he anchors his films in social reality. His films are strongly marked by the local and regional environment of the city of Marseille, and in particular L'Estaque, (north-west Marseille), for example in Marius et Jeannette. His 2011 film The Snows of Kilimanjaro premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the2011 Cannes Film Festival.