Filmmaker Carla Garapedian to Lecture On Preserving Genocide Testimonies

NEW YORK — The late Dr. J. Michael Hagopian’s award-winning documentary film, “The River Ran Red,” will be screened at the United Nations during a symposium on April 12 on preventing genocide. The honorary chairs of the symposium are Eugene-Richard Gasana, Rwandan ambassador to the UN, and Garen Nazarian, Armenia’s ambassador to the UN.
Carla Garapedian, a filmmaker and member of the Armenian Film Foundation board of directors, will speak after the screening at the UN on the topic of “Acknowledging the Genocide of Armenians.”
Hagopian’s wife, Toni, and daughter, Joanne, will also attend the screening.
The following day, Garapedian will present a lecture, titled “The Digital Revolution: Armenian Genocide testimonials and the Shoah Visual History Archive,” at the National Association of Armenian Studies and Research in Belmont, Mass. Her April 13 lecture will be in honor of Hagopian, the founder of the Armenian Film Foundation and NAASR’s first board member for California (1959-65).
Garapedian will discuss the new ways Armenian Genocide survivor and witness testimonies are being made available to universities around the world via the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive. Founded by filmmaker Steven Spielberg in 1994, the Shoah Foundation has 52,000 Holocaust survivor video interviews and is now adding testimonies from other genocides, including the massacre of Armenians in 1915. Hagopian’s 400 filmed survivor and eyewitness testimonies will be the first of the Armenian Genocide interviews to be included in this digital collection.
During her talk, Garapedian, the project leader for the Armenian Film Foundation’s digitization effort, will give a demonstration of Shoah’s powerful search engine and discuss the challenges of presenting survivor information via the Internet.
Garapedian is the director of the film “Screamers,” which was widely credited with helping to change the public debate on recognition of the Armenian Genocide in 2006 and 2007. A native of Los Angeles, Garapedian worked as a producer, director and correspondent for BBC in London after earning a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
She is the recipient of the Armin T. Wegner Humanitarian Award and was recently given the Clara Barton Medal of Gratitude from the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute. She worked closely with Hagopian on his “Witnesses” trilogy of documentary films on the Armenian Genocide. “The River Ran Red” is the third film in the trilogy.
The April 13 lecture begins at 8 p.m. at the NAASR Center, 395 Concord Ave. in Belmont.