Written by Ken Jaworowski, November 9, 2017

A level-headed documentary lies behind the hot-blooded title of “Intent to Destroy: Death, Denial & Depiction.” While there may be no completely dispassionate way to discuss its topic — the Armenian genocide — the film’s balance of emotion and composure helps make its stories even stronger.

Some 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks in the early part of the 20th century. What should be an accepted fact remains a provocative topic, as the Turkish government continues to ignore or deny the events and, as it has for a century, coerce businesses and push other governments to do the same.

Joe Berlinger, the director, uses old footage of survivors and insights from historians to provide an overview of the crimes. He also embeds himself with the cast and crew of “The Promise,” a recent fictional film set around 1915 that explores the fighting and mass killings. Mr. Berlinger’s plan is smart as well as symbolic — evidence shows that the Turkish government has often pressured studios into shelving movies about the genocide.

Discussions on the film set are intertwined with historical analysis, and there are explorations of crowd psychology, revisionism and German cooperation with the Ottoman Turks; it’s no stretch to see how the massacre of Armenians helped lay groundwork for the Holocaust.

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Joe Berlinger’s documentaries, which include “Paradise Lost” and “Brother’s Keeper,” have often focused on the justice system.

Written by Michelle Lanz, November 13, 2017

His new film, called “Intent to Destroy,” takes an unusual angle about what many people consider to be a miscarriage of justice. The film looks at how Hollywood has depicted the Armenian Genocide, and how it also has been pressured — and agreed — to ignore that story.

The Turkish government refuses to acknowledge — and even denies — what historians broadly agree was the Ottoman Empire’s extermination of about 1.5 million Armenians starting in 1915.

Berlinger takes an interesting approach to telling this story. He frames his documentary around the making of another movie — last year’s historical drama, “The Promise,” directed by Terry George and starring Christian Bale and Oscar Isaac. The film is set in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of World War I and follows Isaac as a  young Armenian medical student.

The Frame’s John Horn recently spoke with Berlinger.

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Oscar-nominated filmmaker Joe Berlinger doesn’t mind taking on some powerful forces.

Written by Matthew Carey, November 10, 2017

He squared off with oil giant Chevron in Crude. In the Paradise Lost trilogy, he went up against prosecutors in the notorious case of the West Memphis Three. With his latest film, Intent to Destroy, he’s running afoul of the government of the Republic of Turkey.

“Bring it on, that’s my attitude,” Berlinger tells Deadline.

Intent to Destroy, which recently qualified for Oscar consideration, recounts the Armenian Genocide that began in 1915 — the massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians that most historians believe was planned and implemented by the Ottoman state in its waning years. The film likewise explores the policy of genocide denial vigorously maintained by modern-day Turkey, which rose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

“I was not really interested in just telling the story of the genocide. But I wanted to tell the story about denial,” Berlinger says. “To me only part of the film is about the actual facts of the genocide. The rest of the film is about the aftermath of denial, the mechanism of denial.”

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It’s a movie about a historical crime, but it’s also a movie about another movie

Written by Alan Scherstuhl, November 8, 2017

In Intent to Destroy, documentarian Joe Berlinger attempts to assemble a sort of meditative history of the Armenian genocide and its century-long cover-up by the Turkish government out of a curious source: behind-the-scenes footage of the production of Terry George’s film The Promise, a sweeping historical saga with movie stars and first-rate production values, financed independently and released in the spring of 2017.

As a film, The Promise is interesting for its subject and the struggle to get it made, rather than its own drama or technique; Intent to Destroy uses The Promise as something of a guide, as our entree into the history, as if the filmmakers assume that we need to see Oscar Isaac to care about the extermination of millions. “There’s a scene in the movie where Christian Bale goes and attempts to take pictures of what’s happening to the Armenians,” one of the many interviewees tells us, his words illustrated with a clip from The Promise. He continues, “In the real world, it was forbidden to take pictures of anything.” That leads to an enlightening discussion of the practicalities of the Ottoman Empire’s mass murder of Armenians.

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Salon talks to the maker of a new documentary “Intent to Destroy,” about the making of a film on Turkish atrocities

Written by Tom Roston, November 26, 2017

What if, back in the ’90s, the U.S. State Department had leaned on Steven Spielberg and asked him to not make his movie “Schindler’s List” because it would upset our NATO ally Germany?

Ludicrous, right?

But that’s the question director Joe Berlinger asked when he recently discussed his new film, “Intent to Destroy,” a documentary that just premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Tuesday. The nonfiction film deals with the Armenian genocide perpetrated by Turkey in 1915, leaving more than a million people dead, as told through the making of the narrative film “The Promise,” which hit theaters on April 21.

In referencing “Schindler’s List,” Berlinger wasn’t being overly dramatic. He was talking about an actual event in history from the 1930s, when another Armenian genocide film, “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,” was in production but scrapped because Turkey pressured the U.S. State Department to lean on MGM to not make the movie. Berlinger (“Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,” “Paradise Lost,” “Brother’s Keeper”), a nimble and revered documentarian, has managed to construct an incisive, emotional look at the genocide itself, as well as its representation, and lack thereof, in the movies.

Before “The Promise,” there had never been a mainstream telling of the genocide, thanks at least partly to pressure from genocide deniers aligned with the Turkish government. In “Intent to Destroy,” Berlinger talks to Canadian director Atom Egoyan, who describes being cajoled and intimidated to not follow through with making his independent film about the genocide, “Ararat,” which he released in 2002.

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