Film Archives

Turkey: 1915’ film to be screened at Lake Van International Film Festival

August 21, 2015 By administrator

1915-genocide-film

The Lake Van International Film Festival is set to celebrate its fourth year this fall, keeping to its tradition of beginning the festival on September 1, which marks World Peace Day in Turkey.

The theme of the festival this year is “Cultural Heritage”, and will include “1915,” the feature film debut of Garin Hovannisian and Alec Mouhibian, about the Armenian Genocide, Asbarez.com reports.

With Turkey continuing to deny the Armenian Genocide, it came as no surprise that Turkish television station Canal Turk was threatened with boycott and protest after they decided to air Atom Egoyan’s “Ararat” in 2006. While the film was still shown, it was an edited version with many scenes depicting the massacres of 1915 cut.

This year, however, in a city very symbolic and controversial for Armenians and Turks alike, “1915” will be screened—unedited, between September 1 and 7, 100 years after the beginning of the Genocide.

As the Lake Van International Film Festival begins on World Peace Day, and is operating under the theme of “Cultural Heritage” in a historically Armenian city, it seems that co-director Garin Hovannisian’s hope that his film would go beyond art and serve “as an act of defiance against the continuing silence, indifference, and denial that have fueled an entire century of genocide,” could be realized.

Set and filmed in Los Angeles, 1915 follows one man’s dangerous and controversial decision to stage a play that would bring the ghosts of a forgotten tragedy back to life, exactly 100 years after it occurred.

The film stars Simon Abkarian, Angela Sarafyan, Samuel Page, and Nikolai Kinski.

Original score to the movie was composed by a Grammy-award winning composer Serj Tankian, front-man of popular rock band System of a Down.

Source: Panorama.am

Perhaps a new film about the Armenian Genocide with Gérard Depardieu

August 11, 2015 By administrator

A film about the Armenian Genocide, whose main actor Gerard Depardieu, is in progress under the leadership of director Artak Igityan (Artak IGIT).

Would be considered in other roles, Gérard Darmon, Samy Naceri, Olivier Sitruk, Irene Jacob and John Paul Gabor. For music, Michel Legrand would have agreed.

Anatolia Story should be shot from November, Armenia, Turkey, France and Germany.

Artak Igityan (pictured, alongside Gérard Depardieu) has shot two films, including Sunrise over Lake Van (2011), which traces the history of Garabed, whose mother miraculously survived the 1915 Armenian genocide.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015,
Jean Eckian © armenews.com

First Armenian-Iranian film shooting underway in Artsakh

July 14, 2015 By administrator

First Armenian-Iranian documentary feature film is being shot in Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh). Directed by Anahit Abad, the movie “Eve” is supported by Iranians technically, while the actors are mainly Armenian.

Honored Artist of Armenia, Elina Aghamyan, as well as several actors from Artsakh, are starring, while the children were chosen from school students.

The film will be shot in Karabakh, particularly in Stepanakert, Shushi, village of Karintak, as well as in the area of 13th century monastery Dadivank.

According to producer Behruz Paknahad, the movie mainly relates to human values. “The entire humanity is the audience, as the film is aimed at prevention of crimes, human sufferings and tragedies,” he said, according to newspaper Hayastani Hanrapetutyun (Republic of Armenia).

Trailer for first Turkish film on Armenian Genocide released

July 6, 2015 By administrator

LOST BIRDS TRAILER (English Subtitled) from Kara Kedi Film on Vimeo.

The trailer for “Lost Birds,” the first film made in Turkey about the Armenian Genocide, was released on June 30.

“Lost Birds” tells the story of a brother and a sister who are left behind during the ‘1915 Armenian exile,’ Today’s Zaman reports.

Written and directed by Armenian director Aren Perdeci and Turkish director Ela Alyamac, “Lost Birds” is a turning point for cinema in Turkey.
LOST BIRDS TRAILER (English Subtitled) from Kara Kedi Film on Vimeo.

The trailer for “Lost Birds,” the first film made in Turkey about the Armenian Genocide, was released on June 30.

“Lost Birds” tells the story of a brother and a sister who are left behind during the ‘1915 Armenian exile,’ Today’s Zaman reports.

Written and directed by Armenian director Aren Perdeci and Turkish director Ela Alyamac, “Lost Birds” is a turning point for cinema in Turkey.

“Lost Birds,” a heartfelt film with themes of love and family directed by Armenian director Aren Perdeci and Turkish director Ela Alyamac is the first movie to depict the tragedy in a film shot in Turkey on its 100th anniversary.

The film is led by young actors Dila Uluca and Heros Agopyan, as well as an ensemble cast of Armenian actors living in Turkey.
“Lost Birds,” a heartfelt film with themes of love and family directed by Armenian director Aren Perdeci and Turkish director Ela Alyamac is the first movie to depict the tragedy in a film shot in Turkey on its 100th anniversary.

The film is led by young actors Dila Uluca and Heros Agopyan, as well as an ensemble cast of Armenian actors living in Turkey.

Anna Melikyan’s “About Love” wins grand prize at Russia’s Kinotavr fest

June 15, 2015 By administrator

Filmmaker Anna Melikyan won the grand prize Sunday, June 14 of the 26th Kinotavr Open Russian film festival for her film “About Love,” an anthology of five short stories. It also received Prize of Film Distributor’s Jury, Asbarez reports.

The annual Kinotavr is the most important Russian film festival and also the world’s largest of national cinema. In 2014, Anna Melikyan won the best director prize at Kinotavr.

Anna Melikyan is a Russian-Armenian film and TV director/ producer whose work has been recognized with several awards. After her participation at Sundance Film Festival she was listed in the TOP 10 of most perspective film directors by Variety magazine. In 2008 Melikian’s “Mermaid,” (Rusalka, 2007) was awarded by the Berlin International Film Festival Prize.

Awards: Berlin International Film Festival, FIPRESCI Prize for “Mermaid,” Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, 2001, Special Jury Award for “Poste restante”, Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival, 2008, Feature Film for “Mermaid,” (2007), Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, 2008, Independent Camera Award for “Mermaid” (2007), Melbourne International Film Festival, 2001, City of Melbourne Award for Best Short Experimental “Poste restante” (2000), Sofia International Film Festival, 2008, Grand Prix for “Mermaid,” Sundance Film Festival, 2008, Directing Award, World Cinema – Dramatic for “Mermaid.”

L.A. Film Festival to screen first Armenian-themed film

June 13, 2015 By administrator

“Aram, Aram” Director Christopher Chambers works on set with actor Levon Sharafyan

‘Aram, Aram’ is slated to premiere Sunday at Los Angeles Film Festival.

By Alene Tchekmedyian, alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

Filmmaker Christopher Chambers grew up alongside the Armenian community in Los Angeles, but it wasn’t until he met an Armenian working on the set of a horror film more than 10 years ago that he learned about that nation’s history and culture.

The friendship sparked his curiosity, leading him to write and direct a film about a 12-year-old Armenian boy sent to live with his grandfather in Little Armenia in Los Angeles from his native Beirut after a family tragedy.

Premiering on Sunday, “Aram, Aram” is the first Armenian-themed story selected to screen at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Chambers said.

Chambers wrote the first draft of the script about five years ago and spent the last year revising it and shooting the film, drawing on interviews with about 150 area Armenians — some of whom owned shoe stores like the grandfather in the film, played by Glendale resident and actor Levon Sharafyan. They all had something to add to the story.

“I wanted to do justice to the people in the Armenian community who shared their stories with me,” Chambers said.

What helped John Roohinian, the 14-year-old who plays Aram, was putting himself in the shoes of the title character, who in the film struggles to choose between right and wrong as he settles into his new identity in America.

“I just can’t wait to see the reaction,” Roohinian said, adding that during an early screening, the film “brought tears to everyone in the room.”

For more information, visit www.lafilmfest.com.

The Guardian: Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad review – Armenia’s tragedy becomes meaty drama

May 22, 2015 By administrator

Love on the run … Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad. Photograph: PR

Cannes 2015

French-Armenian director Robert Guédiguian takes on the Armenian genocide and the campaign of vengeance against Turkey in a film that goes in unexpected directions

The indefatigable Robert Guédiguian returns to the highminded thriller style that proved successful with his 2009 picture The Army of Crime, which unveiled local complicity in the betrayal of a wartime resistance cell in German occupied Marseilles. This new film, for which the original French title is a slightly more snappy Une Histoire de Fou (A Story of Madness), jumps forwards three decades, to Marseilles in the 1970s, and takes as its subject the wave of bombings and assassinations perpetrated by Armenian radicals against Turkish interests, in response to the genocidal killings of Armenians during and after the first world war.

With his Armenian heritage, this counts as deeply personal territory for Guédiguian; though you sense that the director’s uncompromising political sternness makes it difficult for him to fully plant a flag. Nevertheless, he has produced a film that both acts as a useful primer for understanding the decades-long grievance that the Armenian genocide produced, and discusses the peculiar politics of direct action terror in the 1970s.

Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad begins with a black-and-white preface, describing the assassination of Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman minister generally considered to have initiated the 1915 massacres, by Soghomon Tehlirian in Berlin in 1921; he was acquitted by a German court who, somewhat ironically, were outraged by Tehlirian’s accounts of Turkish-organised death marches and concentration camps. The film then abruptly cuts to the 1970s and the Armenian diaspora in Marseilles where we home in on a storekeeper called Hovannes (Simon Abkarian, from Army of Crime), his wife Anouch (Ariane Ascaride, Guédiguian’s wife and regular collaborator), and hotheaded son Aram (Syrus Shahidi). Fed with tales of Turkish brutality by Anouch’s aged mother, Aram joins a local group of like-minded agitators, which becomes the gateway drug of the very 70s form of urban terrorism. Soon Aram finds himself clutching a detonator, waiting to blow up the Turkish ambassador to France.

t’s here that Guédiguian’s takes a significant detour into more complex moral discussion. As Aram is about to push the button, a random cyclist pulls up behind the ambassador’s car; Aram makes the choice to set off the bomb anyway. The cyclist, called Gilles, is not killed, but severely enough injured to require months of operations and be largely confined to a wheelchair. Aram disappears to Beirut, there to join up with like-minded urban guerrillas and continue the campaign of terror; but racked with guilt, Anouch tracks Gilles down and offers him the family’s help, as a kind of penance. Gilles, angry and bitter, takes up the offer; after practically moving into Aram’s old bedroom, he starts to take on and identify with the Armenian cause. Meanwhile, over in Beirut, Aram swiftly becomes disillusioned with his commander’s callousness towards innocent bystanders – as Gilles once was – but can’t quite bring himself to quit for a more principled splinter group to stay with his lover, Anahit.

All this makes for a meaty two-hour-plus drama, with Guédiguian sketching in the moral dilemmas with clarity and firmness. The central debate is rehearsed again and again: can innocents ever be sacrificed for a cause, however urgent? Some of the dialogue is a little decks-clearing – Ascaride at one point quickly explains that “most Armenians abhor violence” – while the largely studio-bound sets make the film feel a little airless. It’s only when we get to Armenia in the final frames that the horizons open up. Guédiguian, none the less, has something interesting to say; his film is always good, if it’s not quite brilliant.

Source: The Guardian

Armenian Genocide film by Robert Guediguian screened at 2015 Cannes Film Festival

May 21, 2015 By administrator

The ripple effects of the Armenian Genocide on subsequent generations are felt in the 2015 drama Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad by Robert Guediguian. The drama Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad by Guediguian was screened in the Special Screenings section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

Cannes regular Guediguian, the social-realist chronicler of working-class Marseille, reconnects with his paternal roots in Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad, an impassioned consideration of the Armenian genocide’s lasting impact on the displaced generations that followed, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The English-language title comes from the lyrics of a 1980 hit by French pop songstress France Gall. But the source material is an autobiographical novel by Spanish journalist Jose Antonio Gurriaran, who was semi-paralyzed in a bomb blast planned by militants from the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) in Madrid in 1981. During his recovery, he researched the Ottoman Empire’s extermination and removal of Armenians from their homeland during World War I, a crime against humanity still officially denied by Turkey. As a result, Gurriaran became an activist for international recognition of the Armenian Genocide.

Documentary Film on the Assyrian Genocide Shown in Sweden

May 12, 2015 By administrator

By Bar Daisan, AINA News

Sodertalje, Sweden (AINA) — A documentary film on the Turkish genocide of Assyrians in World War One premiered yesterday in the city of Sodertalje, 36 kilometers south of Stockholm. The documentary, titled Seyfo 1915 – The Assyrian Genocide was directed by Assyrian filmmaker Aziz Said, who lives in Berlin. The film was produced by the Assyrian Federation of Sweden. Nearly 600 people attended the premiere.

The documentary tells the story of the genocide perpetrated by the late Ottoman government against the Assyrians, Greeks and Armenians — the Christian population of Turkey.

“Many of those who came to see the movie are people who themselves have lost relatives who were murdered a hundred years ago,” said Afram Yacoub, the President of the Assyrian Federation in Sweden.

The story of the film starts in Sweden. A Sweden-born journalist of Assyrian origin travels with a film crew to her parent’s homeland in Tur Abdin in southeastern Turkey in order to follow remaining traces of the crimes committed there during the year 1915. Assyrians call the year 1915 Seyfo, meaning sword. The film crew visited the cities Mardin, Diyarbekir, Midyat, Siirt and multiple other locations of where the genocide occurred.

The film includes testimony from several European, Turkish and Assyrian historians, as well as genocide researchers, including Professor Taner Akcam, Dr. Gabriele Yonan and Professor David Gaunt. The film includes testimony from survivors of the genocide.

750,000 Assyrians (75%) were killed in the genocide, as well as 500,000 Greeks and 1.5 million Armenians.

Related: Assyrian Genocide 100

The viewer of the documentary is transported into the villages in southeastern Turkey and confronted with images of devastation, where once proud houses and churches stood. The area looks like abandoned. The evidence of the past horror visible in many stone and wall ruins. The statements of the descendants of the victims of the genocide are heart-wrenching, indicating the scale of the tragedy.

Speaking at the premiere, director Aziz Said said the project was “a very emotional experience…I wanted to share with you this story and what I’ve learned with this film…its objective is to serve as a bridge of reconciliation, acceptance and peaceful coexistence between Turks, Kurds and Assyrians not only in Turkey but also in the European Diaspora. I hope it helps understand history of the region.”

The film contributes 100 years later to the memory of the greatest catastrophe in modern history of the Assyrians. This is particularly important for today’s young Assyrian people in the Diaspora and the interested European co-citizens and Kurdish and Turkish neighbors in Turkey. Such a documentary thus helps to keep the memory of the victims of the genocide alive, because Turkey as the formal successor state of the Ottoman Empire has not recognized this genocide and even vehemently denies it.

“Under the directorship of Aziz Said an impressive and professional document has been created,” said Dr. Gabriele Yonan, author of the very first book published 1989 in German about the Assyrian Genocide and who was among the invited guests in Berlin. “At the same time it is evidence that even after four generations Seyfo is alive among the descendants of victims and perpetrators. Also, it is shows that historical research focused on the Assyrian genocide has made progress in recent decades. Seyfo 1915 – Assyrian Genocide will be certainly an important film for the next generation.”

Two weeks ago the documentary was shown at a private screening in Berlin. While the German Parliament was discussing whether to recognize the genocide, the documentary was shown on Monday, April 22nd to an invited audience at the town hall of Berlin’s Schoneberg, a location famous for hosting John F. Kennedy on June 26th, 1963, when he said “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

Berlin’s audience of about 100 invited spectators were Germans, Turks, Kurds and Assyrians. Also present was the film crew that accompanied Aziz Said for several months in Turkey and Sweden.

“I was deeply touched and my heart was full of compassion for the Assyrian families, victims and relatives alike,” said Imogen Schafer, following the end credits of the documentary while the passionate beautiful music of the film was fading away at the background.