During the production of the Ottoman lieutenant the creative team reached out to

Project Save a Watertown Massachusetts-based archive of photographs of the

Armenian diaspora the team was asking permission to use

historical photos of Armenia that the archive owned for use in their film, which was

said in the early days of the Ottoman Empire's entry into World War I.

When Project Save vetted the film's financiers during the review of the request

they determined that they were untrustworthy and declined to grant the use of their archive.

And good job by them because when you work anywhere that serves to recognize the Armenian

genocide, you better expect that every time you pick up the phone it's going to be some crank on the other end.

Better to just let it go to voicemail.

And in watching the film, the scene that was to make use of the requested photos is fairly obvious

because the photos they were able to obtain for the film are compressed and digitally

lossy like they rated the Creative Commons Image Library for whatever they had and then hit

Transform in Adobe Photoshop.

We must speculate that many of the actors and the director of today's film regret not having vetted

the producers themselves, because while Eastern Sunrise Films has a track record of fairly large-scale productions in Turkey,

it is clear in retrospect that this film was conceived of and pushed into production

specifically to undermine a film we reviewed previously on Friendly Fire, the promise.

Director Joseph Rubin is contractually barred from speaking negatively about the film

despite edits done by Eastern Sunrise after he finished working on it and his

silent speaks volumes. It's the pleading the fifth of press junket answers and

not a good look and it's clear the producers deceive the people who made the film in service of a larger

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