Los Angeles Times
calendarlive.com
March 23 2006

TELEVISION
‘Armenian Genocide’ will show at Egyptian

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By Rachel Abramowitz, Times Staff Writer

WITH local PBS affiliate KCET-TV refusing to air his documentary “The
Armenian Genocide,” filmmaker Anthony Goldberg has decided to rent
out Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre to show the film in continuous free
screenings on April 17 – the same day it will be playing on most of
the top PBS stations in the country.

“We will continue to screen the film that day and night as long as we
have the theater,” Goldberg said Wednesday.

The filmmaker, who is paying for much of the $10,000 tab out of his
own pocket, noted that “the largest market of Armenians outside
Armenia is in Los Angeles.”

Goldberg’s one-hour documentary focuses on the Ottoman Empire’s role
in the massacre of at least a million Armenians during and right
after World War I.

The Ottoman Empire became the modern republic of Turkey, whose
government disputes that a genocide occurred, attributing the deaths
instead to war, disease and starvation.

The documentary has already created a flap, in part because PBS
commissioned a 25-minute panel discussion to run afterward, which
featured two academics who believed that the killings constituted
genocide, and two who argued that a holocaust did not occur.

An Armenian group launched an online petition against the panel
program and several members of Congress complained to PBS. They
argued that the network would never follow a documentary about the
genocide of Jews during World War II with a panel discussion
featuring holocaust deniers.

KCET said it wouldn’t run either the documentary or the panel
follow-up.

Bohdan Zachary, the station’s executive director of programming, said
it would instead air a French documentary about the Armenian
genocide, which the station felt offered a more comprehensive
examination of the issue.