The Armenian National Committee – Western Region (ANC-WR) has announced that filmmaker Suzanne Khardalian will serve as a panelist in “Lights, Camera, Activate,” which will cover the ways in which film, music and the arts can be used to promote grassroots activism.
The presentation is part of the ANC Grassroots weekend that will take place from Friday, November 25 to Sunday, November 27, 2011, at the Sheraton Universal Hotel.
Khardalian is the director and producer of the riveting new film “Grandma’s Tattoos” that lifts the veil of thousands of forgotten women – survivors of the Armenian Genocide – who were forced into prostitution and were tattooed to distinguish them from the locals. In 1919, just at the end of WWI, the Allied forces reclaimed 90,819 Armenian, young girls and children who, during the war years, were forced to become prostitutes to survive, or had given birth to children after forced or arranged marriages or rape. Many of these women were tattooed as a sign that they belonged to an abductor. European and American missionaries organized help and picked up and saved thousands of refugees who later were scattered all over the world to places like Beirut, Marseille and Fresno. The film is also Khardalian’s personal journey into her own family’s history to investigate the true story of her late grandmother, Khanoum.
Khardalian presently lives in Stockholm, Sweden. She studied journalism in Beirut and Paris and worked as a journalist in Paris until 1985 when she started to work on films. She also holds a Masters Degree in International Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and contributes articles to various journals. She has directed more than 20 films that have been shown both in Europe and the United States.
