This essay is concerned with how Atom Egoyan represents the transmission of traumatic events on both a social and familial level in his meta-cinematographic film Ararat (2002). It examines the process of dealing with Armenian remembrance and Turkey’s denial of genocide through the theoretical lens of trauma and memory studies on attempts to establish essential historical truth by either collectively remembering or forgetting. This essay sheds light on questions such as who the agencies of memory are and who has the authority to represent the past while considering the limit of representing traumatic events through the ambiguous accounts. Egoyan’s Ararat deals with the mourning process of the Armenian catastrophe, which reflects the effects of trauma on four generations of a family after 1915. Some of the later generations’ trauma is not related with the genocide; however, Egoyan manages to tie the conflicts among generations by comparing collective and individual traumatic experiences. The film shows how the trauma is transmitted through each generation, under what conditions this happens, and how this trauma is shaped and re-shaped according to the political conditions of the time. By making a film-within-a-film Egoyan is able to tell multiple stories from different points of view. This structure creates a space for the director to be self-critical and self-reflexive, which is meta-fictional or rather meta-cinematographic as well as conscious of its own condition of production. Ararat has been critiqued as a genocide film and from some points of view it has been called a “propaganda film”. However, in this paper I attempt to show first how Egoyan sees genocide films as kitschy and one-dimensional because of their limited representational ability within historical epic melodrama. Second, I try to apply trauma theory, which has never been applied to Ararat. The attempts to reconstruct individual/collective trauma and the limits of it depend on “who” constructs it and “why” they have done so. These are crucial questions to ask in order to comprehend the representation of the trauma and its limits.