Time & Perspective Quote by Atom Egoyan

Egoyan is doing something crafty here: he shifts the spotlight from the event to the afterlife of the event. For a director who built a career on fractured memory and moral aftershocks, that pivot is the whole point. Saying the story is "universal" isn’t a flattening move so much as a lure. He invites the audience in with the promise of human-scale identification, then tightens the frame around the uglier, more political engine: denial.

The key phrase is "not what happened, but what continues to happen". It reframes history as a present-tense system, not a closed chapter. In the context of Egoyan’s work around the Armenian Genocide (and the long campaign to contest, minimize, or bureaucratize it out of public reality), the line reads like a diagnosis: violence doesn’t end when the killing stops. It persists through euphemisms, diplomatic pressure, textbook edits, forced amnesia, and the quiet social costs imposed on people who insist on naming what occurred.

There’s also a meta-cinematic subtext. Egoyan isn’t just talking about politics; he’s talking about representation. Film can dramatize atrocity, but it also runs into the brutal fact that images don’t win arguments against organized denial. So he positions the “compelling aspect” as the ongoing struggle over truth itself: who gets to define the narrative, whose pain is deemed credible, and how institutional refusal becomes a second wound. Universal, in his hands, means repeatable: the pattern of atrocity followed by denial, and the cultural machinery that makes forgetting feel normal.