Atom Egoyan

Atom Egoyan
Egoyan at the Third Golden Apricot Film Festival, February 11, 2007
Born	Atom Yeghoyan July 19, 1960 (1960-07-19) Cairo, Egypt
Alma mater	University of Toronto
Occupation	film director, stage director, screenwriter, producer & actor
Spouse	Arsinée Khanjian
Website
http://www.egofilmarts.com/

Atom Egoyan, OC (Armenian: Ատոմ Եղոյան; born July 19, 1960) is a critically acclaimed Armenian-Canadian stage director and film director. Egoyan made his career breakthrough with Exotica (1994). His most critically acclaimed film is The Sweet Hereafter (1997), and his biggest commercial success is Chloe (2009).

Egoyan has been nominated for two Academy Awards - The Sweet Hereafter for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. He also won several awards at Cannes Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and Genie Awards.

His work often explores themes of alienation and isolation, featuring characters whose interactions are mediated through technology, bureaucracy or other power structures. Egoyan's films often follow non-linear plot-structures, in which events are placed out of sequence in order to elicit specific emotional reactions from the audience by withholding key information.

In 2008 Egoyan received the Dan David Prize for "Creative Rendering of the Past".

Life and career

Egoyan was born Atom Yeghoyan in Cairo, Egypt, the son of Shushan (née Devletian) and Joseph Yeghoyan, artists who operated a furniture store. His parents were Armenian-Egyptians, and he was named Atom to mark the completion of Egypt's first nuclear reactor. In 1962, however, his parents left Egypt for Canada, where they settled in Victoria, British Columbia, and changed their last name to Egoyan. Atom and his sister, Eve, now a concert pianist based in Toronto, were raised by their parents in British Columbia.

As a boy, Atom's desire for assimilation into Canadian society and his struggle with his father led him to reject his family's Armenian culture.^{[citation needed]} However, years later, when he attended the University of Toronto, he began to study Armenian history.

As a teenager, he became interested in reading and writing plays. Significant influences included Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Egoyan also attributes his future in the film industry to the film Persona, which he viewed at age fourteen, according to an interview he had with journalist Robert K. Elder for The Film That Changed My Life.

It gave me an incredible respect for the medium and its possibilities. To me, Persona marries a pure form and a very profound vision with absolute conviction. It’s very inspiring. I felt that it was able to open a door that wasn’t there before.

He graduated from Trinity College at the University of Toronto. It was at Trinity College that Egoyan came into contact with Harold Nahabedian, the Armenian-Canadian Anglican Chaplain of Trinity College. In interviews Egoyan credited Nahabedian for introducing him to the language and history of his ethnic heritage.

Egoyan is now based in Toronto, where he lives with his wife Arsinée Khanjian, a trilingual (English, French and Armenian) Armenian-Canadian actress who appears in many of Egoyan's films, and their son, Arshile (named after the Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky), who attends the Toronto French School. In 1999, Atom Egoyan was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Egoyan has directed a dozen full-length films, several television episodes, and a few shorter pieces. His early work was based on his own material. In 1984, his debut film "Next of Kin" worldpremiered at the International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg and won a major prize. He received some notice for the film Exotica (1994), but it was Egoyan's first attempt at adapted material that resulted in his best-known work, The Sweet Hereafter (1997), which earned him universal critical acclaim and Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

He also directed Sarabande featuring Khanjian, Lori Singer, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma's performance of Bach's Fourth Suite for Unaccompanied Cello, as part of the latter's Inspired by Bach film series for Sony Classical.

The film Ararat (2002) generated much publicity for Egoyan. After Henri Verneuil's French-language film Mayrig (1991), it was the first major motion picture to deal directly with the Armenian Genocide. Ararat later won the Best Picture prize at the Genie Awards.

In 2004 Egoyan opened Camera Bar, a 50-seat cinema-lounge on Queen Street West in Toronto.

In 2005 Atom Egoyan joined the faculty of the media and communications division at European Graduate School (EGS) in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he conducts intensive summer seminars. Beginning in September 2006, Egoyan taught at the University of Toronto for three years. He joined the faculty of arts and science as the dean's distinguished visitor in theatre, film, music and visual studies.

In 2006, he received the Master of Cinema Award of the International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg.

Later, he directed the erotic thriller Chloe (2009), theatrically released by Sony Pictures Classics on March 26, 2010. This film grossed $3 million in the United States theatrically and became one of the higher-grossing specialty films in the United States in 2010(according to Variety, "$3 million is the new $10 million" for specialty films' box office in 2010). Several months after the DVD/Blu-ray release of Chloe, Atom Egoyan said that Chloe had made more money than any of his previous films. The success of Chloe led Egoyan to receive many scripts of erotic thrillers.

Egoyan has won four awards each at the Cannes Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival.

Filmography

Feature films

Year	Film	Notes
1984	Next of Kin	First met Arsinée Khanjian
1987	Family Viewing
1989	Speaking Parts	Best Motion Picture nomination, including five others, at the 1989 Genie Awards
1991	The Adjuster
1993	Calendar
1994	Exotica	Won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes
1997	The Sweet Hereafter	Won three awards at Cannes
1999	Felicia's Journey	Palme d'Or nomination at Cannes
2002	Ararat
2005	Where the Truth Lies	Palme d'Or nomination at Cannes
2008	Adoration
2009	Chloe

TV films

• In This Corner (1985)
• Gross Misconduct (1993)
• Sarabande (1997)
• Krapp's Last Tape (2000)

Short films

• Howard in Particular (1979)
• After Grad with Dad (1980)
• Peep Show (1981)
• Open House (1982)
• Men: A Passion Playground (1985)
• Looking for Nothing (1988)
• Montréal vu par... / Montreal Sextet (1991)
  • segment: En passant (In Passing)
• A Portrait of Arshile (1995)
• The Line (2000)
• Diaspora (2001)
• Chacun son cinéma / To Each His Own Cinema (2007)
  • segment: Artaud Double Bill

Documentary films

• Citadel (2003)

Bibliography

• Dear Sandra Atom Egoyan, Volumina (2007)

External links

• Ego Film Arts - official Web site
• Atom Egoyan Faculty page at European Graduate School (Includes biography, filmography, photos and video lectures)
• Atom Egoyan at the Internet Movie Database
• Atom Egoyan at AllRovi
• Order of Canada citation
• CTV.ca Filmmaker Egoyan set to teach at U. of Toronto
• Canadian Film Encyclopedia
• northernstar.ca
• Discussion of Egoyan's film, Calendar by Ron Burnett
• Literature on Atom Egoyan