The film “Caravan 1915”, which is devoted to Armenia and the Armenians, is no longer in the box office in Turkey. According to the Turkish NTV, the decision on removing the film from the box office was announced by film’s screenwriter and director Ismayil Gyunes, who also stated that the reason for removal were the problems with distribution and the preconceived moods of movie theaters.

According to Gyunes, almost all the stages of film production were accompanied with problems, and now there are even problems with presenting the film.

Gyunes compared this attitude with censure, noting that it doesn’t matter if it is the government or a movie theater hindering screening of the film.

“The result is the same. It’s censure when a director is not allowed to show his film to the public. The person who does it does not matter at all,” the director stated, according to ermenihaber.am.

The director complained that he had initially reached agreements with 54 movie theaters. Later, he barely managed to reach agreements with 84 movie theaters, but the film was supposed to be shown in at least 300 movie theaters.

He also touched upon the Turks’ lack of awareness of the topic, stating that only history scholars know about the issue.

Gyunes informed that he had conducted large-scale studies before production and had tried to present what happened 102 years ago based on those studies.

According to Gyunes’s studies, the Ottoman Empire spent 256,000,000 Kurush to organize the deportation of the Armenians when the Ottoman Empire was in poverty.

“If a government has a plan to annihilate a nation, it doesn’t need to spend that much money. The government developed a plan, established laws and regulations and declared that it would punish those who failed to act in accordance with those laws. For security considerations, people were moved from one sector of the Ottoman Empire to another in trains and on donkeys. We wanted to show the sufferings that they underwent during the deportations.”

The film’s director emphasized the fact that the decision to shoot the film “Caravan 1915” was made after the Armenian Genocide message that current President Recep Tayyib Erdogan conveyed during his term in office as Turkey’s Prime Minister.

According to the director, the film was created based on the idea of “just remembrance” (this is a phrase that shows the new manifestations in the recent policy of denial of the Armenian Genocide in Turkey and is aimed at stressing the fact that both Turks and Armenians suffered equally in 1915-ed.).