Newly released film, The Promise, touches on the heavy and sensitive topic of war, and brings an unacknowledged casualty of war to the spotlight- the Armenian Genocide. It was released April 21st, three days away from the 102nd anniversary of the genocide on April 24th, 1915.

According to Google, the film is about a “Brilliant medical student Michael (Oscar Isaac) [who] meets beautiful dance instructor Ana (Charlotte Le Bon) in late 1914. Their shared Armenian heritage sparks an attraction that explodes into a romantic rivalry between Michael and Ana’s boyfriend (Christian Bale), an American photojournalist who’s dedicated to exposing the truth. As the Ottoman Empire crumbles into war-torn chaos, their conflicting passions must be deferred as they join forces to get themselves and their people to safety.” The film focuses upon this love triangle and how the lives of the characters are permanently altered as the Armenian Genocide begins.

The dramatic film displays the heavy effects of war in its brutality, with the display of violence and death to no end. It shows the “death marches” taken upon Armenians forced to walk hundreds of miles in the desert, where most died. Those too weak were frequently shot and killed, and the rest remained malnourished, dehydrated, sick, and exhausted. According to History.com, “Frequently, the marchers were stripped naked and forced to walk under the scorching sun until they dropped dead. People who stopped to rest were shot.” Many were tortured and killed on the way to the 25 concentration camps set up in the Syrian Desert. The most famous camp was that of Der Zor where an estimated 300,000 Armenians were killed. According to Christopher J. Walker, “‘Deportation’ was just a euphemism for mass murder. No provision was made for their journey or exile, and unless they could bribe their guards, they were forbidden in almost all cases food and water.” Those who survived landed up between Jerablus and Deir ez-Zor, “a vast and horrific open-air concentration camp”.

The film also features these concentration camps, where Armenians would work all day in harsh conditions, once again starving, thirsty, and ill, and killed upon injury or disease. The Minority Rights Group describes it as, “Those who survived the long journey south were herded into huge open-air concentration camps, the grimmest of which was Deir-ez-Zor… where they were starved and killed by sadistic guards. A small number escaped through the secret protection of friendly Arabs from villages in Northern Syria.”

The Promise portrays the genocide from start to end, beginning with the fairly peaceful lives of the main characters in Constantinople and  progressing to when conflict began within the Ottoman Empire. This causes the lives of characters Ana and Michael to be put into danger.

So how did this all start? In 1915, leaders of the Turkish government set in motion a plan to expel and massacre Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Armenia had control of the region before it was absorbed into the massive Ottoman Empire during the 15th century. In the Ottoman Empire, Armenians were a religious minority, as most inhabitants and rulers were Muslim. Because of this, they were subjected to unequal treatment, such as paying higher taxes than Muslims, having few political and legal rights. However, according to History.com, “They tended to be better educated and wealthier than their Turkish neighbors, who in turn tended to resent their success.  At the end of the 19th century, Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II, obsessed with loyalty above all else, and angered with the Armenian campaign for basic civil rights, declared that he would put an end to “the Armenian question”. “I will soon settle those Armenians,” he told a reporter in 1890. “I will give them a box on the ear which will make them…relinquish their revolutionary ambitions.”

Soon, the first Armenian massacre took place. In response to large-scale protests by Armenians, Turkish military officials, soldiers and ordinary men sacked Armenian villages and cities and massacred their citizens, murdering hundreds of thousands. These massacres occurred for some time, first in the 1890s, but continued until and during the genocide. These late massacres were shown in The Promise, when journalist Chris (Christian Bale) discovers bodies with signs attached to them, and a village burnt and destroyed.

But, in 1908, new Turkish rulers came to place, overthrowing the current sultan. These young Turks wanted to “Turkify” the empire. According to their beliefs, non-Turks– especially Christian non-Turks– were a serious threat to the empire.

So, in 1914, Ottoman religious authorities had declared jihad (holy war) against all Christians except their allies. Military leaders began to argue that the Armenians were traitors.  As the war grew in its intensity, Armenians began to organize volunteer battalions to help the Russian army fight against the Turks in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. These events, along with general Turkish suspicion of the Armenians, led the Turkish government to push for the removal of the Armenians from the war zones along the Eastern Front.

On April 24, 1915, the Armenian genocide began. On that day, the Turkish government arrested and executed hundreds of Armenian intellectuals. After that, regular Armenians were kicked out of their own homes and sent on the death marches through the Mesopotamian desert without food or water. Muslim families moved into the homes of deported Armenians and seized their property. These are depicted in The Promise when Chris, after finding the destroyed village, sees a death march and someone who collapsed from exhaustion get shot.

In 1922, when the genocide was over, there were just 388,000 Armenians remaining in the Ottoman Empire. Originally, there were around two million. 1.5 million were dead.

The Promise was created to bring attention the genocide. Ever since the genocide ended, the Turkish government denied there ever was a genocide in the first place. The Armenians were an enemy force, they argue, and their slaughter was a necessary war measure. Today, Turkey is an important ally of the U.S. and other Western nations, and so their governments have likewise been reluctant to condemn the killings. However, in March 2010, a U.S. Congressional panel at last voted to recognize the genocide.

Denial of the Armenian Genocide is illegal in France, Switzerland, Greece, Cyprus  and Slovakia. Currently, only the governments of Turkey and Azerbaijan deny that there was an Armenian genocide, but many other countries, most controversially the United States have purposely avoided officially recognizing it as a genocide to avoid endangering relations with Turkey. In 2016, the Anti-Defamation League stated that it extended its support for genocide recognition by the U.S.

The Promise has also been affected by this denial. When it showed its first screening at the Toronto Film Festival in late 2016, IMDb was flooded with thousands of one star reviews, suspected by the film’s crew to be Turkish bots. “The day after we screened the movie, 70,000 people went on IMDb and said they didn’t like the movie,” explained co-producer Mike Medavoy. “There’s no way that many people saw the movie after one screening. There aren’t that many seats in the theater.”

After three screenings, the film had over 86,000 ratings, while 2016’s highest grossing film, Finding Dory, had about 72,000. 64% of The Promise’s ratings were one star, while 35% are ten star. Previous films have also received backlash for films portraying the genocide.

Currently, The Promise is rated 6/10 on IMDb. It is rated PG-13 for thematic material including war atrocities, violence and disturbing images, and for some sexuality. For now, though the sensitive topic covered may create tension, The Promise still delivers a powerful message that successfully depicts the struggles and atrocities of the Armenian Genocide.

The genocide is symbolized by a purple forget-me-not, which has five petals, each of which symbolizes the five continents, where Armenians settled after the genocide. The forget-me-not was chosen to show that the genocide, and those 1.5 million casualties, will forever be remembered.