‘Intent to Destroy’: What It’s Like to Expose One of Hollywood’s Most Horrifying Untold Stories.

Joe Berlinger, a prolific documentarian, discusses ‘Intent to Destroy,’ his latest hot-button film.

Some say that the most groundbreaking movies Tribeca Film Festivalhas to offer are in the documentary category. Intent to Destroy, the latest from prolific documentarian Joe Berlinger, is no exception. Like his other work—most notably the Paradise Lost trilogy—this is a film that does not shy away from controversy; instead, it encourages the viewer to draw their own conclusions based on the powerful examination of all sides of an issue.

Using the framework of a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Terry George’s The Promise, Berlinger dives into the history of the Armenian genocide—what happened, how it was covered up, and why the world refuses to acknowledge it.

What Berlinger has produced will give you chills. Intent to Destroy is unlike any other historical account. With deft craftsmanship and a sensitivity to nuance, Berlinger breaks down the 1915 slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turkish state and the ensuing cover-up, a story that has been systematically silenced by America and Hollywood ever since. The documentary is an engaging portrait of a nation of people brought to their knees—a nation of people that is still rebuilding, 100 years in the wake of the devastation. It’s a grim portrait of our world, which chose diplomacy and censorship in place of humanitarianism.

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Review: Hot Docs Festival 2017

Intent to Destroy
(USA, 115 min.)
Dir. Joe Berlinger
Programme: Special Presentations (International Premiere)

Veteran doc filmmaker Joe Berlinger’s explosive 2016 film Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru was one of the most exciting features at last year’s Hot Docs festival. The seasoned award-winning director returns this year with Intent to Destroy, an engrossing film-within-a-film about the shooting of The Promise, a historical fiction feature about the Armenian genocide.

Certainly, the film industry loves a doc about what it does—and it is a passionate line of work—but Intent to Destroy raises the stakes of this inward-looking examination significantly. Berlinger embeds himself and his crew within the production of The Promise, a feature that takes place within the 1915 Armenian genocide in which 1.5 million people were killed by Ottoman Turks. Directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Terry George (Hotel Rwanda), The Promise is a highly politicized and controversial project to undertake, considering the Turkish government’s total erasure of the massacre from official discourse.

The documentary’s exposition unfolds fairly conventionally at the outset: the facts and narrative behind the genocide are introduced lucidly by voice-over and subject matter experts, perhaps as a pre-emptive nod to the fact that audiences may not be familiar with the particulars of this oft-ignored historical event (I certainly wasn’t). However, as Berlinger begins to look deeper into the whys and hows of the contemporary denial of the genocide by Turkey (and other governments, including the United States), the significance of the documentary’s focus on a feature production becomes obvious, ultimately pointing to nothing less than the power and influence of mass media, particularly the film industry itself. Berlinger delves deeply into history books, political alliances, economic factors, and inter-governmental relations in order to show the shocking degree to which historical records can effectively be wiped clean (and entire populations misled) in the interests of a powerful few.

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