The UCLA Promise Armenian Institute regrets to announce that we must cancel the in-person presentation of the film The Vindicators, originally scheduled for Thursday, October 13, 2022.
The Vindicators: Champions of Truth, Destroyers of Denial
The Vindicators: Champions of Truth, Destroyers of Denial showcases the brave legion of international scholars who joined forces to dismantle the Republic of Turkey’s denial of the 1915 Armenian Genocide … and ultimately fostered hard-fought official recognition by the United States government.
Four decades in the making, THE VINDICATORS includes Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard Professor and current USAID Administrator Samantha Power; veteran German journalist Wolfgang Gust; and the UCLA Promise Armenian Institute’s inaugural Director of the Armenian Genocide Research Program, Taner Akçam. For the first time on screen, Professor Akçam decodes some of the secret Ottoman telegrams he painstakingly discovered inside the Republic of Turkey's archives in Istanbul, presenting the first official Turkish evidence that the extermination of the Armenians was the explicit intent of Ottoman Turkey.
Today, the United States Senate (unanimously) and House of Representatives (405-11), all 50 states and more than 25 nations recognize the Armenian Genocide. On April 24, 2021 (Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day), President Joseph Biden honored his longstanding written promise with a White House statement formally acknowledging the extermination of 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I as “genocide.” Before the 2020 assault on Armenian Nagorno Karabakh/Arstakh by their ally, Azerbaijan, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised, “we will continue to fulfill the mission our grandfathers have carried out for centuries in the Caucasus.”
In 1988, PBS presented An Armenian Journey, the first documentary about the Armenian Genocide to be broadcast nationwide in primetime. Filmmaker Theodore Bogosian’s investigation, which featured his clandestine trip to Turkey with a Genocide survivor and recovery of long-lost Ottoman proof verifying her on-site testimony, sparked an international incident when the Turkish Embassy in Washington and its Registered Foreign Agents unleashed a furious-but-failed effort to block the broadcast – and went on to intensify their denial of the Genocide for decades to come.
The Vindicators returns documentarian Bogosian to contemporary Turkey, Armenia, Israel, and Germany to introduce viewers to the meticulous scholars whose research vindicates the personal histories of Armenian Genocide survivors; consoles their descendants; and proves to those still in denial that official recognition is right, reasonable, and justified.
Funding for The Vindicators has been provided by the International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies and the Zoryan Institute.
Theodore Bogosian is a practicing filmmaker and television producer with scores of primetime network documentary and episodic drama credits. Bogosian and his programs have won top prizes everywhere from the National Press Club to the Chicago Film Festival to the Writer’s Guild of America, East, as well as multiple Natioanl and Regional Emmy nominations and awards. His achievements include the first documentary produced in high-definition (HD) format. Since 1978, Bogosian has personally secured access to and conducted interviews with dozens of newsmakers, including several US Presidents, Vice-Presidents and other national candidates, as well as Nobel Prize recipients, Olympic medalists, artist Roy Lichtenstein, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride, and many others. His worldwide charitable work includes multiple African and Eurasian trips for foundations promoting clean water, education and human rights. He has received honors from organizations including the American Society for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons and the Huntington's Disease Society of America. A longtime member of the Director’s Guild of America, Bogosian has been elected multiple times by his peers to serve the DGA's National Board and Eastern Director's Council. He is also a 35-year member of the Writer’s Guild of America, East. Beginning in 2007, Bogosian taught the Visiting Filmmaker’s Master Course for 9 semesters at Duke University. In 2012, Bogosian was appointed as Visiting Scholar in International Studies at Brown University’s Watson Institute and has served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice at the Cogut Institute since 2015. He now teaches an innovative 3D/UHD/VR production seminar using smartphones for which he received Brown's Teaching with Technology Award in 2016. He received a BA from Duke University in Political Science in 1973 and an MPP from Harvard University's JFK School of Government in 1981.
Taner Akçam is the is the inaugural director of the Armenian Genocide Research Program of the Promise Armenian Institute at UCLA. Previously he was the Kaloosdian and Mugar Chair in Modern Armenian History and Genocide in the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Akçam is widely recognized as one of the first Turkish scholars to write extensively on the Ottoman-Turkish Genocide of the Armenians in the early twentieth century. His latest book is Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide (Palgrave 2018). He is the founder of Krikor Guerguerian Online Archive, located at: wordpress.clarku.edu/guerguerianarchive.
Carla Garapedian, Ph.D., is a filmmaker and member of The Armenian Film Foundation, which has forged a new partnership with the Promise Armenian Institute – to support the study of Armenian film and filmmakers, as well as to create the Armenian Image Archive, a repository and platform for the study of Armenian photography – from early to contemporary photographers.
