With the attempted annihilation of the Armenian people being
the first major genocide of the 20th Century, the Armenian Film Foundation’s
filmed interviews are significant to the scope of the Shoah Foundation
Institute’s Visual History Archive.
The two organizations and Dr. Hagopian will work together to
make approximately 400 testimonies of Armenian Genocide survivors and witnesses
available for educational purposes through the Institute’s Visual History
Archive.
The Testimony Collection
The foundation’s film archive includes nearly 400 interviews
of Genocide survivors and witnesses conducted in 10 countries. The voices of
these filmed survivors and witnesses, now deceased, echo from all corners of
the world in 10 different languages. The majority of the 400 interviews are either
in English or Armenian (some in rare dialects), with some witnesses speaking in
Arabic, Greek, Spanish, French, Kurdish, Turkish, German, and Russian. Those
interviewed were from 8 to 29 years of age at the time of the Genocide.
The major areas that were covered in those interviews are
from the following cities and towns of Anatolia (mainly Eastern Turkey):
Adabazar, Eskisehir, Konia, Sivas, Kharpert, Urfa, Aintab, Marash, Malatia,
Dickranagerd, Erzeroum, Van, Bitlis, Der Zor, Smyrna, Erzingan, Musa Dagh,
Kessab, Aleppo, Shabin Karahisar, Guren, Sepastia, Banderma, Yozgat, Everek,
Hadjin, Zeitoun, Amassia, and Kutahya.
The Armenian Film Foundation
The Armenian Film Foundation was established in 1979 as a
non-profit, educational, and cultural organization dedicated to the
documentation in motion pictures of Armenian heritage and life. Its goals are
to inspire pride in and to create worldwide recognition of the Armenian people
and their contributions, and to preserve the visual and personal histories of
the witnesses to the Armenian Genocide of 1915.
Dr. J. Michael Hagopian, co-founder of the Armenian Film
Foundation, has released 17 documentary films on the Armenian heritage,
culture, and history, including an epic trilogy on the Armenian Genocide
comprised of Voices from the Lake, Germany and the Secret Genocide, and The
River Ran Red.
The foundation has in its archives nearly 400 irreplaceable
and invaluable filmed interviews with witnesses and survivors to the Armenian
Genocide, as well as Genocide descendants, scholars and others.
Recognizing the pressing need to record the experience of
Armenians who were subject to the first genocide of the 20th Century, Dr.
Hagopian in 1968 began filming Armenian Genocide survivors and eyewitnesses.
As aging Genocide survivors began dying in large numbers,
the Armenian Film Foundation embarked on a massive project to interview on 16mm
film the remaining survivors of and eyewitnesses to the Armenian Genocide of
1915. When the survivor interview project commenced in 1982, an estimated 2,500
credible eyewitnesses to the Armenian Genocide of 1915 were still alive.
Fifteen percent of these were subsequently completed and documented on film by
the Armenian Film Foundation, which retains the original footage, sound tapes,
record books, relevant photographs, and other documentation that may have been
provided by the survivors and eyewitnesses.
Dr. J. Michael Hagopian
Born to an Armenian family in Kharpert-Mezreh, Dr. Hagopian
is a Genocide survivor who has dedicated his life to the visual documentation
of the Turkish extermination of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915. In all, his work
encompasses nearly 400 interviews of survivors of and witnesses to the Armenian
Genocide and 40 years of research.
Dr. Hagopian holds a doctorate in international relations
from Harvard University and an undergraduate degree from the University of
California at Berkeley. He also did two years of graduate work in cinema at the
University of Southern California. He taught political science and economics at
the University of California at Los Angeles; American University of Beirut,
Lebanon; Banaras Hindu University, India; and Oregon State University,
Corvallis.
Dr. Hagopian is the chair of the Board of Directors of the
Armenian Film Foundation and producer/director of many award-winning
documentary films. As President of Atlantis Productions, he has also been
engaged in the research, writing and production of educational and documentary
films for instructional and informational use in the classroom and on
television.
He has written, directed and produced more than 70
educational and documentary films which collectively have won over 160 national
and international awards, including two Emmy nominations for the writing and
production of The Forgotten Genocide, the first full-length feature film on the
Armenian Genocide of 1915. Germany and the Secret Genocide received the coveted
First Place Golden Camera Award in the History Category from the 2004 U.S.
International Film and Video Festival, the largest festival of its kind. The
River Ran Red was voted Best International Historical Documentary by the New
York International Film & Video Festival in 2009 and it won second place in
the History and Biography categories at the 2009 U.S. International Film and
Video Festival.
Several of his films were produced under grants from the
U.S. Office of Education and the Ethnic Heritage Program, the MacArthur Foundation,
California Endowment for the Humanities, and California State Department of
Education.
Dr. Hagopian himself is the recipient of numerous honors,
including Jewish World Watch’s “I Witness” Award for dedicating his
professional life to chronicling the history of the Armenian people and
commemorating victims of the Armenian Genocide. The Armenian National Committee
honored him as Man of the Year in 2000.
Of the agreement, Dr. Hagopian commented, “We believe this
agreement is the beginning of a long-term partnership with the world-renowned
USC Shoah Foundation Institute that will promote the study and prevention of
future genocides. Inclusion of these filmed Genocide survivor interviews, a
‘national treasure’ of the Armenian people, side by side with testimonies of
Holocaust survivors in an archive that can be accessed and searched around the
world, will finally help us fulfill our mission of disseminating these
eyewitness accounts worldwide.
Victimization and genocide perpetrated and denied in one part
of the world, can become the breeding ground for greater crimes against
humanity in another part of the world,” said Dr. Hagopian, who is 96 years old
and a Genocide survivor himself. “I have felt that it was my responsibility to
educate and inform so that history won’t be repeated.”
On Friday, December 10, 2010, J. Michael Hagopian passed
away; he was 97 years old. Our work to make the collection of Armenian genocide
survivor and witness testimonies available through the Visual History Archive
will continue.
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