FILMMAKER CONFRONTS BITTER CULTURAL LEGACY

The Toronto Star
April 6, 2009 Monday

Hagop Goudsouzian travelled to his ancestral homeland to ease a
cultural burden and left with bones in his pocket.

"Armenian identity is coloured by the fact that we are living in
diaspora," says the Armenian-Canadian filmmaker, who was born in Egypt
a long time after his grandparents had travelled there by foot. "We
are all in exile. … The genocide issue is like an unresolved cultural
burden that is necessary at one point in one’s life to confront."

His 2005 documentary My Son Shall Be Armenian follows Goudsouzian
and five other Montrealers who lost relatives in the genocide begun
by Ottoman Turks in 1915.

"When my son was born, that’s when I realized that I have to do
something, so that I don’t transmit, in addition to the cultural
identity, the cultural burden," says Goudsouzian, whose father died
before he was able to make his own journey home. His son is 13.

He remembers visiting a cave in northern Syria where it is said 50,000
Armenians were burned to death.

"We went down. We walked around – it was really dark – with
flashlights and everything. I brought back with me remnants of human
bones. Originally one piece was in my pocket," he says. "It was
crumbling in my pocket."

They travelled to modern-day Armenia where he met with survivors of
the genocide.

"It’s touching history," he says, before choking back tears as he
recalls one conversation in particular. "She says, ‘I just want to
go back home and drink the water and be buried there.’

"It is one thing when you read it in books and it’s another when you
actually meet the person and how she feels about life and what her
dreams are and aspirations."