Don't Tell Me the Boy Was Mad

Robert Guédiguian's film opens with Aram, a young man of Armenian origin from Marseille, blowing up a Turkish diplomat's car in Paris. Gilles, a cyclist passing at that moment, is seriously injured. Aram's mother goes to the hospital and asks forgiveness, which Gilles cannot make sense of, and Aram eventually decides to face the man he injured. The screenplay draws on the book of José Antonio Gurriarán, the Spanish journalist left badly injured by a bomb planted in Madrid by ASALA in 1981. The film names the events of 1915 as genocide and follows how that memory turned into violence in later generations; the official position of Turkey rejects that naming. The documented record is this: between 1975 and the middle of the 1980s ASALA and allied groups killed more than thirty Turkish diplomats and members of their families, the attack at Esenboga airport on 7 August 1982 left nine dead and more than eighty injured, and civilians were killed at Orly in 1983. The film's own movement is a perpetrator sitting down opposite the person he maimed.