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The ripple effects of the Armenian Genocide on subsequent generations are felt in the 2015 drama Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad by Robert Guediguian. The drama Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad by Guediguian was screened in the Special Screenings section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

Cannes regular Guediguian, the social-realist chronicler of working-class Marseille, reconnects with his paternal roots in Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad, an impassioned consideration of the Armenian genocide’s lasting impact on the displaced generations that followed, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The English-language title comes from the lyrics of a 1980 hit by French pop songstress France Gall. But the source material is an autobiographical novel by Spanish journalist Jose Antonio Gurriaran, who was semi-paralyzed in a bomb blast planned by militants from the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) in Madrid in 1981. During his recovery, he researched the Ottoman Empire’s extermination and removal of Armenians from their homeland during World War I, a crime against humanity still officially denied by Turkey. As a result, Gurriaran became an activist for international recognition of the Armenian Genocide.