The inaugural Pages and Pictures Non-Fiction Book Club was covering the title  The Hundred Year Walk by Dawn MacKeen, which we discussed on Friday, January 8. The film related to the book being shown tonight (January 14) will be  The Cut (2014) directed by Fatih Akin.

The Pages and Pictures Book Club runs from January until May and will explore non-fiction books, which are paired with related films. The discussion on a chosen history book happens on the first Friday of each Month at 5 pm, (except in January) in the Montana Room, and a film related to the book will be shown on the second Thursday of each month at 5:30 pm in the Cordingley Room. The book club is led by volunteer Sam Sweeney, a former military interpreter, freelance writer, and founder of the Mesopotamia Relief Foundation in northeastern Syria.

The Cut is set in Mardin, 1915. One night, the Turkish police round up all the Armenian men in the city, including the young blacksmith, Nazaret Manoogian, who is separated from his family. Years later, after managing to survive the horrors of the genocide, he hears that his two daughters are also still alive. He becomes fixated on the idea of finding them and sets off to track them down. His search takes him from the Mesopotamian deserts and Havana to the barren and desolate prairies of North Dakota. On this odyssey, he encounters a range of very different people: angelic and kind-hearted characters, but also the devil incarnate.