"Grandma's Tattoos" shown in Yerevan
Suzanne Khardalian, the director of "Grandma's Tattoos" documentary, is in Yerevan.
The film was shown in Yerevan today with the assistance of ARF bureau's Hay Dat and political affairs office and Moscow Cinema.
"Grandma's Tattoos," a 58-minute-long documentary, chronicles Khardalian's quest to uncover the atrocities that scarred her grandmother, a woman who bore "devilish marks"-tattoos on her face and hands-that were the persistent reminders of a time in captivity and rape during the Armenian Genocide. The film is about Armenian women and girls who, during the 1915 genocide, were taken as sexual slaves by the perpetrators and other groups and often sold repeatedly for some years through a slave-trading network that emerged. The title refers to the fact that owners would tattoo their names on the chests of these women, who after some time often had multiple names tattooed on them.
Swedish-Armenian filmmaker Suzanne Khardalian says she heard her grandmother's story from her mother.
"At the age of 12, my grandmother was raped on a ship by a Turk who then kept her in slavery. We did not have any idea where my grandfather had been those 6-7 years. She was also forcibly marked, -tattooed - as a property, the same way you mark cattle. Grandma Khanoum's fate was not an aberration. On the contrary, tens of thousands of Armenian children and teenagers were raped and abducted, kept in slavery. To make your film reach the audience you had better concentrate on one person, rather than on thousands. I was guided by the principle when shooting the film," tells Khardalian.
The director says after the film was shown in Turkey, she received many complaints from Azerbaijan.
"Political and public circles in Azerbaijan demanded to cancel the screening. To the last moment, the festival administration insisted that they did not seek to politicize the issue. But the film was shown and was of great demand," says Khardalian.
The screening was co-financed by Al Jazeera, English language news TV channel, which has the exclusive right to broadcast the film.
A survivor of the Armenian Genocide Maria Vardanyan, the leading character of the film, passed away two days ago at the age of 105.
