Atom Egoyan, the extraordinary Canadian writer/director, whose impressive body of films include Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter and Felicia's Journey, has returned with an engrossing new film named Ararat. An intense political and personal story of the genocide that befell 1.5 million Armenians, by the Turkish Ottomon soldiers during the First World War. Combined with a handful of modern characters, intimately connected to those recent historical events, the film is ambitious and sprawling, and stands as one of Egoyan's finest.

I confess to having little prior knowledge of the historical events that frame the backbone of Ararat (named for Mount Ararat); specifically the details of the Armenian/Turkish conflict that took place nearly a century ago. To this day the Turkish deny that such a massacre ever occurred. Ararat brings that horrible chapter in recent history to gruesome life. Interweaving multiple story threads, that cross back and forth in time (between modern day Canada, 1934 New York City and 1915 Turkey) the film, nevertheless, coalesces into a stunning whole. Clear in its assertion that who we are today is nothing if not directly defined by our recent and often painful past.

In the present day, a film crew arrives in Canada to shoot a Schindler's List-type modern epic as a contemporary document of the Armenian slaughter. The producer and director (Eric Bogosian and Charles Aznavour) employ an historian, Ani (luminous Arsinee Khanjian, Egoyan's wife and mainstay lead) to consult on the accuracy of the film. Much of Ani's work focuses on the paintings and life of the artist Arshile Gorky, who fled the Armenian extermination for New York City (the liberated Gorky also becomes a minor character) to become a prolific artist.

The production of the film and the actual historical events that provide the backdrop, are interwoven with the present day story. Players here include Raffi (David Alpay), Ani's teenaged son, a production assistant on the film, who makes a pilgrimage to discover the homeland that drove his terrorist father to an assassination attempt on a Turkish official, costing his life. Celia (Mari-Josee Croze), Raffi's lover and stepsister, is haunted by the accidental death of her own father and skeptical of Ani's involvement. David (Christopher Plummer), a customs official struggles with his son's (Brent Carver) homosexuality and is focused on interrogating Raffi upon his suspicious return from Armenia. One of the film's principal actors (Elias Koteas) doubts the reliability of whether or not the genocide ever occurred, and also happens to be the lover of David's son.

To be sure, Ararat surely contains a great deal of plot. But Egoyan is nothing if not clear-headed and methodical in his approach to etching out the complex dimensions of his various characters and time periods. There are several agendas in Ararat, and the film skillfully weaves together historical events and modern living, the political and personal. With its compassionate view of the large canvas Armenian holocaust and its attention to small personal dramas that are inextricably linked, Ararat contains a rich sense of history and tragedy.

All of Egoyan's considerable storytelling strengths converge in a multi-layered climax that culminates in cross cutting. We see the finished film's premiere, the ravaging historical bloodshed, circa 1915, and a simply marvelous scene where David interrogates Raffi at length about the nature of his trip to Armenia and his conflicted personal and political motivations.

In addition to the politics and the personal provocations explored in Ararat, Egoyan infuses the film with a potent sense of the power of art, exploring the contemporary legacy of Gorky's famous works that reverberate in the present with his haunted voice of persecution and loss. Within his transcendental paintings, Egoyan imagines art as a repository for all that we are and have been, with a dimensional sensibility relating to politics, love, family and pain.

Ararat is an uncompromising film that pulls no political punches about its stance as a lasting historical record of an unthinkable and barbaric, albeit lesser-known, holocaust. At one juncture in the film, a character doubts that such a revolution ever even happened, echoing popular skepticism about the authenticity of such events. Another corrects him with a factual quote, from a confident Adolph Hitler in the days before he began his Nazi reign of European terror, "Who remembers the extermination of the Armenians?"

As told by Egoyan and acted by his accomplished cast, Ararat is a haunting film with a rich subject and an accomplished sense of history and its effect on art, love, identity and family. It's one of Egoyan's very best films, which is to say filmmaking at its very best.