Diasporan

The process by which ethnic sites become calendar illustrations--and ethnicity and history become a commodity--entails a chain of communication that passes from nationalist to diasporan to assimilationist, bringing the first two closer together and moving the second two further apart, a chain all of us are involved in nowadays on multiple levels, in relation to both our own families and ethnic roots and those of others.

Using some of his familiar loop strategies, whereby the same material gets compulsively replayed, Egoyan tells a story about a marriage that disintegrates during a trip from North America to Armenia, where an assimilated Canadian-Armenian photographer (Egoyan himself), while shooting a dozen rural churches for a calendar, becomes insanely jealous when his diasporan Armenian wife (Egoyan's real-life wife Arsinee Khanjian) converses with their guide in Armenian.

Not ripoff but great triumph of; the world adopts the diasporan esthetic."