Some slight waves were made earlier this year when Fatih Akin pulled his forthcoming "The Cut" from the Cannes Film Festival citing "personal reasons." So we figured the movie would wind up somewhere else on the 2014 fall festival slate, and indeed, it’s now at Venice and the first trailer has arrived.
Starring Tahar Rahim, details about the plot had largely been kept under the wraps, with only the only hint that Rahim plays a Charlie Chaplin-esque character, in the movie that caps off the director’s “Love, Death and the Devil” trilogy. But not only does the promo open a window onto the movie, so too does the official extended synopsis and brie director’s statement.
Mardin, 1915: one night, the Turkish police round up all the Armenian men in the city, including the young blacksmith, Nazaret Manoogian, who is separated from his family. Years later, after managing to survive the horrors of the genocide, he hears that his two daugthers are also still alive. He becomes fixated on the idea of finding them and sets off to track them down. His search takes him from the Mesopotamian deserts and Havana to the barren and desolate prairies of North Dakota. On this odyssey, he encounters a range of very different people: angelic and kind-hearted characters, but also the devil incarnate.
THE CUT is an epic film, a drama, an adventure movie and a western all rolled into one. The film may be set a hundred years ago, but it could not be more topical: it tells a tale of war and displacement, as well as portraying the power of love and hope, which enables us to achieve the unimaginable.
THE CUT is the conclusion of Fatih Akin’s Love, Death and the Devil trilogy. In HEAD-ON (2004) we see a young German-Turkish woman’s furious struggle to live her own life and learn how quickly love can turn into pain. THE EDGE OF HEAVEN (2007) tells the tale of six people whose paths cross without meeting each other; it is death that brings them together in the end. THE CUT now explores the theme of “the devil”, examining evil and the harm we are capable of inflicting on others – both unwittingly and deliberately, showing the fine line that often separates good from evil. Fatih Akin’s view on the world also has a defining influence on the final part of the trilogy: “THE CUT has become a very personal film. Thematically, it explores my conscience and formally it expresses my passion for the medium of film.”
"The Cut" will screen in Competition, and the film runs 138 minutes long. Trailer below.
