People do love a good sappy love story and add an extra slice of danger, set it via a dark time in a nation’s history like a genocide. In Terry George’s The Promise, a passionate love story set amid the violence of the Armenian Genocide at the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Oscar Isaac, Christian Bale and Charlotte Le Bon make up the love triangle and today Entertainment One provide the UK trailer, check it out…
It is 1914. As the Great War looms, the mighty Ottoman Empire is crumbling. Constantinople, the once vibrant, multicultural capital on the shores of the Bosporus, is about to be consumed by chaos. Michael Boghosian (Oscar Isaac), arrives in the cosmopolitan hub as a medical student determined to bring modern medicine back to Siren, his ancestral village in Southern Turkey where Turkish Muslims and Armenian Christians have lived side by side for centuries.
Photojournalist Chris Myers (Christian Bale), has come here only partly to cover geopolitics. He is mesmerised by his love for Ana (Charlotte le Bon), an Armenian artist he has accompanied from Paris after the sudden death of her father. When Michael meets Ana, their shared Armenian heritage sparks an attraction that explodes into a romantic rivalry between the two men. As the Turks form an alliance with Germany and the Empire turns violently against its own ethnic minorities, their conflicting passions must be deferred while they join forces to survive even as events threaten to overwhelm them.
The one promise that must be kept is to live on and tell the story.
Since the movie’s world premiere at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, there was talk this movie may have been in the running for the recent Oscars. It ticks all the boxes the Academy do like but now it has an April release date We do hope this just result of a packed nomination line up. We can assume this movie will be a highly sensitive release in Turkey as it’s an issue many still in the country still argue against The Genocide was a Genocide. It does look the genocide maybe more in the background with the love story the main focus.
The Promise is set for an 28th April UK&Irish cinema release (21st April USA), co-starring Jean Reno, Tamer Hasan, and James Cromwell.
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