Russell Crowe's 'The Water Diviner' has been condemned by the makers of a rival film, many critics and an orchestrated letter-writing campaign for what Greek-Australian academic Panayiotis Diamadis has called its "genocide denial by omission."
Salon's Andrew O'Hehir says that there is a shameful and/or oblivious whitewashing of a hugely important historical crime, namely, the displacement and murder of millions of ethnic Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians, beginning in 1914, Stuff.co.nz reported.
The film, which is being released in the US on the centenary of what has become known as Genocide Remembrance Day, has added insult to injury for members of the Armenian diaspora, including American-based filmmakers Garin Hovannisian and Alec Mouhibian, whose own film addressing this history, 1915, opened recently.
In an open letter addressed to Warner Bros, which is distributing The Water Diviner in the US, the pair wrote that Crowe's character discovers that the Turks were never really his enemies. In fact they were the noble victims who ultimately triumphed against the imperial West in World War I.
Using a form letter, correspondents of both Greek and Armenian ancestry, writing from Australia, the US, Israel, Germany and elsewhere, have expressed their outrage at the film's depiction of events, particularly a scene in which Greeks attack a Turkish military train and are labelled as "Satan's army," as well as the general absence of reference to what was going on in 1919, when Crowe's character is in Anatolia.
The letter added that if a film depicting Adolf Hitler as a hero and the Jews as terrorists were made, the reaction would be one of shock and outrage. Crowe's film is a distortion of history that only serves to appease Turkey and its continued agenda of genocide denial.
Australian historian Peter Stanley suggests that rather than a deliberate distortion, the problem with the film is most likely that Crowe, like his writers, has entered a highly contested historical arena, without any idea of what he was getting into. His response was to simply roll over and accept the Turkish version.