CANNES (Public Radio of Armenia) — Indian film director Shekhar Kapur will direct the movie version of Three Apples Fell From Heaven, based on the Micheline Aharonian Marcom novel adapted by Motorcycle Diaries writer José Rivera, Deadline reports.
The film is set in 1915-1917 as Turks slaughtered Armenians, and revolves around a young female refugee taken in by Turkish neighbors after the death of her parents. Her childhood shattered, she now views the remains of her world through a Muslim veil, as several tragic characters circle around her.
While the Armenian Genocide is a century old, there is an eerie parallel to the refugee crisis, beyond Kapur’s memory of his own family forced to flee Delhi as refugees during the partition of India. The filmmakers made available a clip of the young women Kapur has auditioned to play the lead role; they are refugees from Aleppo whose descendants fled there to escape the Armenian Genocide and who had come back to escape the violence that has devastated Syria.
This becomes the first film from a new social justice storytelling production company, Disruptive Narrative, which launched at Cannes as part of Sunday’s Refugee Voices In Film day.
The company is founded by leading human rights lawyer Jen Robinson and Syrian-Armenian actress/writer/producer, Sona Tatoyan.
