USC SHOAH FOUNDATION INSTITUTE SIGNS HISTORIC AGREEMENT WITH ARMENIAN FILM FOUNDATION
Asbarez
Monday, May 10th, 2010
LOS ANGELES
-The USC Shoah Foundation Institute, part of the USC College
of Letters, Arts & Sciences, signed an historic agreement with
the Armenian Film Foundation and Dr. J. Michael and Antoinette
Hagopian. The agreement paves the way for the preservation and
dissemination of the largest archive of filmed interviews with
survivors of and witnesses to the Armenian Genocide.
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 Shoah
Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive. The signed agreement
is the first step in the process to digitize, index, preserve, and
disseminate the filmed testimonies collected by Dr. Hagopian and the
Armenian Film Foundation between 1968 and 2004. Once the process is
complete, the testimonies will become accessible through the Shoah
Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive, which contains nearly
52,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses.
Funds must be raised before work will commence.
"As a preliminary step towards including Armenian Genocide survivor
testimonies in the archive, our agreement with the Armenian Film
Foundation is a major milestone," said USC Shoah Foundation Institute
Executive Director Stephen Smith. "This project will help preserve
evidence of a genocide that must be acknowledged. It will honor the
memory of those whose lives were taken, and it will ensure that future
generations are able to learn from individuals who experienced the
Armenian Genocide firsthand."
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 Institute is beginning to work
with partners around the world to expand its archive with testimonies
from survivors and witnesses of other genocides, including the Rwandan
genocide and the Cambodian genocide.
"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," said Dr.
Hagopian. "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."
The Shoah Foundation Institute’s mission is to overcome prejudice,
intolerance, and bigotry-and the suffering they cause-through the
educational use of the Institute’s visual history testimonies.
"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."
About 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.
About 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.
For more information, visit the Foundations’s website,
About 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.
About the USC Shoah Foundation Institute
Established in 1994 by Steven Spielberg to collect and preserve
the testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust,
the USC Shoah Foundation Institute maintains one of the largest video
digital libraries in the world: nearly 52,000 video testimonies in 32
languages and from 56 countries. The Institute is part of the College
of Letters, Arts & Sciences at the University of Southern California;
its mission is to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry-and the
suffering they cause-through the educational use of the Institute’s
visual history testimonies.
The Institute works within the University and with partners around
the world to advance scholarship and research, to provide resources
and online tools for educators, and to disseminate the testimonies
for educational purposes. In addition to preserving the testimonies
in its archive, the Institute is working with partner organizations
to help document the stories of survivors and other witnesses of
other genocides.
For more information, visit the Institute’s website,