Ararat (2002)

Denial eats the soul in Ararat, Atom Egoyan's sweeping, ambitious, characteristically elliptical meditation on history, identity, and the Armenian Massacre of 1915. The memory of that man-made catastrophe, in which the Turks slaughtered two thirds of Turkey's Armenian population -- more than a million people -- shapes and haunts the psyches of their descendants, whose pain is exacerbated by the official Turkish denial that such a thing ever took place.

Egoyan, Armenian-Canadian and a provocative artist drawn to the consequences of plastering over hard truth (see ''The Sweet Hereafter''), is so much the man for the job that his whole career leads, in a way, to this difficult, dense, passionate drama. It's a story only he would tell this way, circling round and into the painful past through the stories of vivid characters in the crisp Canadian present of multicultural Toronto. Among those struggling to make sense of where they are by facing where they came from are a famous director (Charles Aznavour) who re-creates terrible (historically documented) scenes of atrocity and death in a movie about the events of 1915; an art historian (Arsinee Khanjian, Egoyan's striking muse and wife) who is an expert on the famous Armenian painter Arshile Gorky; her angry son (David Alpay), whose father died trying to assassinate a Turkish diplomat; and her even angrier stepdaughter (Marie-Josee Croze), whose father died a very different death.

As ever, Egoyan assembles a devoted repertory cast, including Christopher Plummer as a customs inspector, Brent Carver as the inspector's gay son, and Elias Koteas as the son's lover (and an actor who plays a villainous role in the movie-within-the-movie). And stalwart Egoyanite Bruce Greenwood enhances the drama as an actor playing Clarence Ussher, an American doctor in Turkey whose real journal, published in 1917, paid witness to history then, just as Egoyan does so ardently now.

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