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The Washington Post news agency has made another reference to the Armenian Genocide film “The Promise”. The article published by the news outlet notes that ‘“The Promise,” the grandest big-screen portrayal ever made about the mass killings of Armenians during World War I, has been rated by more than 111,300 people on IMDb, and has thus far been screened only a handful of times publicly.’

The passionate reaction is because “The Promise,” has provoked those who deny that 1.5 million Armenians were massacred between 1915 and 1923 by the Ottoman Empire or that the deaths of Armenians were the result of a policy of genocide.

The article notes that thousands, many of them in Turkey, have flocked to IMDb to rate the film poorly, adding that though many countries and most historians call the mass killings genocide, Turkey has aggressively refused that label.

The article goes on adding that in March, just a few weeks before “The Promise” was to open, a curiously similar-looking film called “The Ottoman Lieutenant” appeared. Another sweeping romance set during the same era and with a few stars of its own, including Ben Kingsley and Josh Hartnett, “The Ottoman Lieutenant” seemed designed to be confused with “The Promise.” It was the Turkish knockoff version of “The Promise,” minus the genocide.