If history was any guide, the director Terry George figured there’d be weirdness around his new film, “The Promise,” about the Armenian genocide. Sure enough, he was right.

One of the actors, Daniel Giménez Cacho, said he was contacted before filming by a Turkish ambassador. In line with Turkey’s official stance, the diplomat insisted that the genocide, in which nearly 1.5 million Armenians were killed, had never occurred. After the movie’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, it racked up 55,000 lowly one-star votes on the Internet Movie Database, which is quite something, considering only a few thousand people had actually seen it at the three public screenings.

And then, six weeks before “The Promise” hit theaters this weekend came another film that shared uncanny parallels. Like “The Promise,” “The Ottoman Lieutenant” hinges on a love triangle set in Turkey during the early days of World War I. Unlike “The Promise,” “The Ottoman Lieutenant,” which stars Michiel Huisman and Josh Hartnett, was backed by Turkish investors and has been pilloried by critics for whitewashing historical events.

The battle over these two new films represents just the latest front in Turkey’s quest to control the historical narrative. In 1915, Ottoman Turks, fearful that the restive Christian Armenian population would side against them in the war, began massacring Armenians and force-marching them to their deaths. The United Nations, the Roman Catholic Church, the European Parliament, historians and scholars have roundly recognized the atrocities as a genocide, the 20th century’s first.