With the 106th anniversary of the genocide approaching, here are some films which can help you better understand the events.
This week marks the date we officially commemorate the 106th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Many people are not aware that it marked the first time that Western governments, including the US and Canada, launched a humanitarian appeal for an international human rights tragedy. The crimes against the Armenian people were so severe that it was one of the reasons legal jurist Raphael Lemkin created the term “genocide” in the first place.
With the 106th anniversary of the genocide approaching, here are some films which can help you better understand the events.
This week marks the date we officially commemorate the 106th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Many people are not aware that it marked the first time that Western governments, including the US and Canada, launched a humanitarian appeal for an international human rights tragedy. The crimes against the Armenian people were so severe that it was one of the reasons legal jurist Raphael Lemkin created the term “genocide” in the first place.
The history of the Armenian Genocide on film is a curious one. One survivor, Aurora Mardiganian, wrote a biography about the horrors she experienced, titled Ravished Armenia, and she later starred in a Hollywood adaptation of it. The process of making the film was horrifying for Mardiganian, who was not fairly compensated and forced to act out traumatic events that were still raging half a world away — Anthony Slide’s Ravished Armenia and the Story of Aurora Mardiganian is a good read on the topic.
The film was one of many initiatives that helped raise some $117 million (roughly $2 billion today) for Armenian and other refugees fleeing persecution. The film has since been almost completely lost, though roughly 20 minutes survive (it was surfaced in Yerevan decades later by Buenos Aires-based researcher Eduardo Kozanlian). Ravished Armenia would be the only time Hollywood seriously and extensively tackled the topic for roughly half a century (though they certainly tried) until 1963’s America America, directed by Elia Kazan, whose Cappadocian Greek parents survived the same genocide.
This year, there’s some indication that US President Joseph Biden might actually acknowledge the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide. If that’s the case, it will be the first time this happens in such a formal way, and it comes after both the US House and Senate acknowledged the genocide with a non-binding resolution in 2019.
Here’s hoping the US, which has benefited from denial of the event because of its cozy relationship with NATO ally Turkey (the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, which perpetrated the genocide, and which continues to deny it), will turn a new page and do the right thing. These four films highlight not only some of the strongest work made on the Armenian Genocide, but also the range of material available about the topic.
Source: https://allinnet.info/history/notable-cinematic-portrayals-of-the-armenian-genocide/#more-24624