Ararat

Ararat (2002) is Atom Egoyan's layered drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. This Canadian-French film is less a retelling of the 1915 slaughter of Armenians than a study of how that memory, a century on, keeps reshaping the people who carry it. At its core sit the shoot of a sweeping historical movie in Toronto and a family quietly pulled apart by it.

Ani, an art historian, consults on the production; her son Raffi flies home from location filming in Turkey and is held at customs for a long, probing interrogation; on set the siege of Van and the figure of the doctor Clarence Ussher come back to life. Egoyan braids several timelines together — what happened then, what is being filmed now, and what a person is finally willing to admit about their own past. The cast brings together Charles Aznavour, Christopher Plummer, Elias Koteas, and Simon Abkarian.

It's a film about denial and the cost of truth, told sideways through art, lies, and family silences — the trademark approach of the director of The Sweet Hereafter. Demanding and heavy, it rewards viewers who care less about spectacle than about how memory actually works. Stream Ararat (2002) online on iFILM.