Артинян Араз

Artinian Araz

Артиньян Араз

http://www.twentyvoices.com/filmmaker.html

Araz Artinian

Canadian-Armenian Araz Artinian spent 27 years trying to comprehend her father’s obsession with his nationality. She spent the next four years feeling growing degrees of that same “Armenian-ness” enter her blood. For the filmmaker, understanding came around the family table in Montreal, through the lens of a camera in Turkey, through the voices of survivors in North America of the very Genocide that has been the theme of her home life, through the lies of a nationalistic tour guide, through the shallow misunderstanding of a contemporary in the land of the “enemy”, and at a memorial in what is now left of her ancestors’ Armenia.

Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator of the Center for the Study of Human Rights at the Worcester State College, Dr. Henry Theriault says: “There exists just a small initial literature on such topics as the intergenerational transfer of genocide trauma.” For that and other reasons, Theriault calls The Genocide In Me “an important teaching tool for me as well as other professors and secondary educators interested in genocide/human rights and identity issues, not to mention popular educators in the Armenian and other communities with similar historical experiences.”

If only for its documentation of these survivors of the 20th century’s first Genocide (whose numbers have already decreased since their interviews), the 52-minute film is of historical significance. But broadened from the confines of ethnicity, The Genocide in Me is about a people being lost, and a person being found.

It is about any of us who might ever ask: “Why am I who I am?”

To contact Araz Artinian, send an email to : info@twentyvoices.com