GLENDALE—Director Suzanne Khardalian will discuss her film, Grandma’s Tattoos, following a screening of the film on Thusday, December 1 at UCLA and Friday December 2, in Glendale.
The first screening, will take place on Thursday from 7 to 9 p.m. at Room 1102 of UCLA’s Perloff Hall, 221 Westwood Plaza, LA, 90095.
This screening is organized by the Armenian National Committee-Western Region, the Armenian Youth Federation, the UCLA Armenian Students’ Association and asbarez.com. Admission is free.
The second screening will take place on Friday at 7 p.m.at the Glendale Public Library Auditorium, 222 East Harvard Street. Admission is free and the seating is limited. Library visitors receive 3 hours FREE parking across the street at The Market Place parking structure with validation at the loan desk.
The program is organized by the Glendale and Burbank chapters of the Armenian National Committee-Western Region and Asbarez Daily newspaper and is sponsored by The Glendale Public library.
Suzanne Khardalian is an independent filmmaker and writer. 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 Master’s Degree in International Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and contributes articles to different journals. She has directed more than twenty films that have been shown both in Europe and the US.
“Grandma was abducted and kept in slavery for many years somewhere in Turkey. She was also forcibly marked, -tattooed – as a property, the same way you mark cattle. The discovery of the story has shaken me. I share the shame, the guilt and anger that infected my grandma’s life. 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,” explained Suzanne Khardalian.
“Grandma’s Tattoos” is a film that lifts the veil of thousands of forgotten women—survivors of the Genocide—who were forced into prostitution and were tattooed to distinguish them from the locals.
I remember my father rescued eight of the dozens of Armenian women who were picked up for wives by the Muslims in the DeirZohr region during the death marches of the genocide. Their husbands would come and threaten us that if we had anything to do with their escape, we would pay dearly for depriving their children of their mother but they didn’t have any evidence or clue that we did it because we did it soo secretly.
if your father is alive, hopefully he has written down the story.
if not, maybe you have recorded his recollections.
Brave man, you father.
I’m a brazilian woman, and I think about this. God bless Armenia