As the world prepares to mark the Armenian genocide, filmmakers and musicians are attempting to raise awareness among an American public largely ignorant of one of modern history's darkest episodes. It is 101 years on Sunday since Turkey's Ottoman government began arresting minority community leaders and setting in motion a campaign of systematic slaughter that had left 1.5 million Christian Armenians dead by the early 1920s.
Turned out of their homes and sent on death marches through the Mesopotamian desert, they were stripped naked and forced to walk until they died of thirst or collapsed and were shot dead. At the same time, the ruling "Young Turks" created death squads to drown countless thousands in rivers, throw them off cliffs, crucify them and burn them alive, raping women and forcing them to join harems or serve as slaves. The collective trauma has been transferred from the original victims to every subsequent generation of Armenians who have carried the unresolved suffering of their ancestors to their new homes across Europe and the United States.
On Sunday thousands of Armenians are expected to rally in Los Angeles -- home to the largest diaspora community in the world -- to demand that the Turkish government finally recognize the massacres as a genocide. Yet there is frustration among the campaigners that ordinary Californians may not have even heard of the events they refer to as "Medz Yeghern" -- or "The Great Crime." French-Armenian filmmaker Robert Guediguian's "Don't Don't Tell Me The Boy Was Mad," which gets its US premiere on Friday at COLCOA, the world's largest festival of French film, staged annually in LA, aims to change that.
"Don't Tell Me The Boy Was Mad" is set around the Armenian diaspora in 1970s and 80s Marseille, France and follows a wave of bombings and assassinations perpetrated by Armenian radicals against Turkish targets across Europe in response to the genocide. Guediguian based his story on "The Bomb," an autobiographical novel by Jose Antonio Gurriaran, who was semi-paralyzed by an Armenian terrorist attack in Madrid but became a leading advocate for international recognition of what he called "the forgotten genocide."
Meanwhile a second film about the genocide, "Armenia, My Love," had its premiere in Pasadena, California last week, also opening at several Los Angeles locations including Glendale, home to around 80,000 of the 200,000-plus Armenians in Los Angeles. Written and directed by Romanian American Diana Angelson, who also stars, the film tells the story of a family living in the occupied territory of the Armenian homeland, now eastern Turkey, in 1915. There is also the release of Grammy Award-winning Los Angeles-based Armenian American musician Serj Tankian's original soundtrack to "1915," a thriller inspired by the events of the genocide which was released last year.
