Interview: Oscar nominated Canadian director shows story on remembrance

"I feel very privileged to have a film here called Remember, the understanding and preservation of history is extraordinary important not to forget," Canadian director Atom Egoyan told Xinhua.

"It's a human process of acknowledgments. The focus of the film is a man, the character of Zev, facing his own terrible past he removed but at a certain time, in the most unlikely way, he will be finally confronted to his own history," Egoyan said in an interview with Xinhua, presenting his movie Remember in competition at the Venice Film Festival.

Egoyan was Oscar nominated for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay (1997) and got Grand Prize of the Jury at the Cannes Film Festival, for his masterpiece The Sweet Hereafter. He presents a movie for the first time at the Venice's Festival.

The plot is about an old man who suffers dementia and has a mission given to him by his friend. He is chasing through the United States a Nazi who killed in Auschwitz his family and his friend. In his unstoppable journey he will be, at a certain point, confronted all of a sudden with his painful past in a shocking final.

Egoyan talked first about how he managed his difficult direction.

"Unlike my previous films that were incredibly complex, I wanted this one to stay as simple as possible because I thought the character was so complex. I wanted my directing to seem almost invisible and observational," said the director.

The research on how Nazis were able to escape to the United States is very important for the movie.

Egoyan said "There is a great book, that just came out, by Eric Lichtblau called The Nazis Next Door. it's shocking how Nazis were flowing to U.S., all the V rocket scientists were allowed free entry and all people who were creating advances technologies were given scandalous access and new identities."

As underlined in the movie, Nazi and its propaganda is still present, about this reality Egoyan remembered "It's quite shocking, in Canada we had Ernst Zundel a neo-Nazi who was publishing these texts on the freedom of expression, this man was such a wacko but still he was able to get attention."

Answering questions about the challenge to make something new on the subject, Egoyan said, "I think I'm very familiar with movies about holocausts. I felt this was a completely original new take. There are moments where you think you have been in my film but you haven't."

Humor in a dramatic film like this is an important element, according to the Canadian director "there is something slightly surreal in this 'road movie', something somehow 'epic'; watching this man crossing borders in an improbable way was quite delicious. I just felt so amused and odd about it." Endit