Who tells the story and why? Inheritance and responsibility in “Ararat” and “Eleanor the Great”

I was 14 when I first watched “Ararat” (2002) at the now-shuttered Cumberland Theater in Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood. It was opening night, and the auditorium was packed with familiar faces from the Armenian community, alongside filmgoers drawn to one of the most anticipated Canadian releases of the year. I was there with a childhood friend, sitting in the dark, not entirely sure what we were about to see. Then the film’s title appeared on the screen, first in Armenian («Արարատ») and only then in English. That moment stayed with me. 

Our people’s painful history — which I had until then mostly encountered in classrooms, community center halls, church sanctuaries and in the quiet pauses when my grandmother avoided specific questions — was suddenly public. It was no longer a family memory or a whispered inheritance; it was projected, spoken aloud, in a downtown Toronto cinema.

But “Ararat” did not tell the genocide in a straightforward, authoritative way. Rather, it showed the difficulty of telling it. The film is full of interruptions: a film being made inside another film, arguments about representation, compromises that blur the line between historical detail and emotional truth. In “Ararat,” director Atom Egoyan refuses the comfort of a single narrative, instead showing how the story reaches us — fragmented, disputed and shaped by the distance between those who lived history and those who inherit it.

Just recently, I watched Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, “Eleanor the Great,” at home with my wife. More than two decades after “Ararat”’s opening night screening, Eleanor arrived on our TV with the quiet ease of on-demand streaming: no theater, no shared audience, only the light of our living room. The experience was smaller in scale, of course, but the question at its core felt unchanged:

This is where “Ararat” and “Eleanor the Great” meet and intersect. Both films take place not at the moment of catastrophe but in the long shadow after. They follow characters trying to carry a story they did not experience directly — acknowledging that this act is complicated, delicate and charged with responsibility. In “Ararat,” the challenge begins with denial. The genocide has been denied for nearly a century by the perpetrator and its successor governments, and, at the time, even by Canada, where the film was made and the film-within-the-film was being shot (Canada’s official recognition of the Armenian Genocide would come a few years later). Against that backdrop, every artistic choice carries weight. Even the question of whether Mount Ararat should appear in the frame becomes charged, not because geography is the point, but because Armenians have spent so long proving their own history. The film’s fractured form reflects that pressure:

In “Eleanor the Great,” the challenge is more internal. The film unfolds in the United States, a country that officially recognizes the Holocaust. Yet it appears at a moment when Holocaust memory is increasingly vulnerable, not only to explicit denial (which persists at the margins) but also to the quieter erosion that comes with time, the fading of firsthand testimony and the recent rise of revisionist or doubt-casting rhetoric in public discourse. The danger here is not state-sponsored erasure but the gradual uncertainty that follows when those who lived the history are no longer present to speak it. 

Eleanor crosses a line because she is trying to keep her friend’s story alive in the only way she can imagine. Her grief pulls her into a narrative that is not hers to inhabit, and the film neither excuses nor sensationalizes the act. It acknowledges the harm and the longing, the fear that once a story stops being told, it may disappear altogether. Her impulse is not rooted in a sense of communal obligation or cultural duty. Eleanor does not suggest she sees herself as preserving Holocaust memory for others. Instead, she is trying to preserve Bessie for herself, an act born out of grief. 

The two films frame the same question from different directions: What do we owe to stories that formed us, but did not originate with us? There is a temptation to simplify this question into a rule, like ‘Tell only what you lived.’ But inherited history does not work that neatly. The descendants of genocide survivors grow up inside stories that shaped their families long before they were born. Silence, too, is an inheritance. Distance does not mean indifference. Lack of direct experience does not mean lack of impact.

At 14, part of me wanted “Ararat” to be clearer, more direct. I wanted it to present the genocide with decisive authority, something I could point to, something that would settle arguments. Instead, the film insisted on uncertainty — the gaps that always remain. Now, I see that as the point. The genocide not only destroyed lives, but it also disrupted continuity and, as such, left us with fragments. 

“Eleanor the Great” understands this intuitively. Eleanor takes on Bessie’s story because she cannot accept her friend’s disappearance. That does not make her actions correct, but it does make them recognizable. She tries to hold a memory close enough that it survives the person who lived it. She does what many of us do when history reaches us in pieces; she fills the gaps with herself.

The question in both films is not whether inherited memory can remain untouched (Spoiler alert: it never does). The question is how to assume responsibility for a story that predates us, without collapsing the difference between living an event and transmitting it. Both “Ararat” and “Eleanor the Great” recognize that remembrance is not a passive act; it requires interpretation, and interpretation is always shaped by the one doing the telling.

Once the last witness is gone, the story does not disappear, but its status changes. It becomes something we maintain through conscious effort rather than immediate memory. The line between safeguarding and reinventing is not easily drawn, and neither film offers a solution. Instead, each focuses on the tension rather than resolving it. “Ararat” carries the weight of a history that is still contested; accuracy becomes part of the struggle. “Eleanor the Great” lives with a gentler but no less significant threat: the quiet fading of memory, even when the facts are known — a fading felt most immediately as the loss of the person who held the story.

To inherit a history is to accept that we hold it imperfectly. We did not witness it, yet we carry its weight. There is no complete or final telling, only the continual effort not to let the story fall away. That effort is the responsibility, and that is what remains.

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