Intent to Destroy

The Promise, directed by Terry George, aspired to be the Schindler’s List of the Armenian Genocide on the 100th anniversary of that tragedy. Among the critics and at the box office, this was not the case. Yet another film came from that process, Intent to Destroy, which led audiences step by step into the Turkish extermination campaign launched in 1915, which killed more than a million people in two years.

Filmed as a companion “making of” documentary for The Promise, Intent to Destroy takes us back to documents, testimony and archival photographs of those killings and to the deportations of Armenians to places like eastern Syria where they would be killed. Veteran doc-maker Joe Berlinger has given us a reality check of the historical record which has been distorted for more than a century. 

Filmography: Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger (2014), Crude (2009), Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004), Brother’s Keeper (1992).