By focusing on destroying nature of politics through the tense dialogues of two powerful men, one of them being a militarist and the other being a humanist, a solider and a theologian, one from East and the other from West; Homo Politicus shows us how humanism against nationality and morals against politics are naive and despair. Digging back into the starting days of Armenian Genocide in 1915, the film, on the axis of an historical dialogue, analyzes the passionate motivation, which the mentality, which planned first genocide of the century, is based on.
Today, World War II is known for the Holocaust and Hitler’s fascism. While the Holocaust is the most well-known link in the chain of genocide, Armenian genocide is actually the first one. This historical meeting taking place between Lepsius and Enver Pasha under the conditions of World War I, gives clues about the political codes of the unlucky end that was experienced by Armenians and a few decades later by Jews. That’s why, it can be taken as an important testimonial for the “beginning of an end”.
How this tragedy did not happen as an eclipse of reason, but more of a meticulously planned social engineering was translated into a filmic atmosphere with certain dramatic additions in Homo Politicus. This story focuses on the point where politics turns into a diplomacy of taking time and coincides a hunger for power, as well as aiming at showing the background of the first political crime of the 20th philosophical conflicts through both characters’ dialogues and body language, the film shows how humanism is naïve against nationalism and reason is helpless against politics. While setting up such a story and atmosphere, the film prefers a film language that reflects the characters with an objective and distant style and that does not over-dramatize this sensitive issue.
The dialogues of the film are written by making use of primary sources related to the topic such as written testimonials of the period’s German and American witnesses which are stored in the archives today, Enver Pasha’s letters and Talat Pasha’s memoirs. Characters’ emotional portrayals together with the representation of the locations are fictitious, while not thoroughly unrealistic. Likewise, Enver Pasha’s headquarter and the room in which the meeting takes century. While portraying the psychological and place is redesigned with fictitious elements.