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  • New film follows a witness to history

    Boston Globe, United States
    Movies

    New film follows a witness to history

    US ambassador reported genocide of the Armenians

    Above: A scene from the documentary ''The Morgenthau Story.'' Below:
    The film's director, Apo Torosyan of Peabody, with Henry Morgenthau
    III, the grandson of the film's subject. Photo

    By Leslie Brokaw

    Globe Correspondent / October 19, 2008

    New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau is the man best known for
    the criminal case he built against Tyco International CEO Dennis
    Kozlowski, who was convicted in 2005 of stealing $150 million from the
    global manufacturing firm.

    After the decision, Morgenthau wrote, "This verdict is an endorsement
    of the principle of equal justice under the law. Crimes committed in
    corporate offices will be treated according to the same standards as
    other crimes."

    The concept of equal justice is hardwired into the Morgenthau
    bloodline. His grandfather, Henry Morgenthau, was the US ambassador to
    the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916, and in that role he was witness
    to the rise of nationalism in Turkey and the deportation and massacre
    of Armenians. Henry Morgenthau brought news of the genocide to the US
    government, which declined to get involved. He published his accounts
    in 1918 as "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story" and dedicated himself to
    providing privately funded resettlement help to Armenian and Greek
    orphans and other refugees.

    Morgenthau is a hero in the Armenian community, and his story has been
    given a new telling in the documentary "The Morgenthau Story," by
    Peabody filmmaker Apo Torosyan.

    Torosyan is a native of Istanbul whose father was Armenian and whose
    mother was Greek. He came to Boston in 1968 and launched a visual
    design company; he sold the company in 1987 and devoted his full
    attention to art - drawing and painting first, then multimedia. He
    pulled from his family history: his grandparents, who starved during
    the Armenian genocide; his father, who as a 5-year-old child had to
    look through garbage cans for food.

    In 2003, Torosyan picked up a camera. He visited Edincik, a Turkish
    village where his father grew up, and made his first movie, "My
    Father's Village." "Voices" and "Witnesses" followed; both are
    collections of interviews with Armenian survivors.

    That brought him to Henry Morgenthau's story, one of the few bright
    lights in a sea of darkness.

    Interviewed in the 56-minute film are Henry Morgenthau III, born in
    1917 and the grandson of Ambassador Morgenthau. He's a television
    producer who spent the later part of his career at WGBH-TV. District
    Attorney Robert Morgenthau also appears, as well as Dr. Pamela
    Steiner, the ambassador's great-granddaughter and a senior fellow at
    the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and project director of HHI's
    Inter-Communal Violence and Reconciliation Project, where she focuses
    on improving the relationship between Turkish and Armenian
    populations.

    Last month, Torosyan traveled to Athens for the world premiere of his
    film at the Cultural Center of Constantinopolitans.

    "I felt on top of the world," says Torosyan of the trip. Over 200
    people attended the gathering, which included discussions about
    Morgenthau and about current reconciliation efforts.

    "I told the crowd how proud I was with my Turkish and Kurdish
    friends," he says. Their ancestors may have killed his, but people
    today are open to talking about the injustice. "Let us hope and not
    hate."

    "The Morgenthau Story" will screen at a half dozen venues in the
    region over the next month including Salem State College on Monday and
    Endicott College, in Beverly, on Friday; the National Association for
    Armenian Studies and Research, in Belmont, on Nov. 6; and Studio
    Cinema, in Belmont, on Nov. 10. Visit www.aramaifilms.com.

    NETWORKING EVENT: The Massachusetts Production Coalition holds its
    Fall Member Meeting on Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. at the Boston University
    Photonics Center on St. Mary's Street. The program includes a
    legislative update from state film office executive director Nick
    Paleologos and IATSE local 481 manager Chris O'Donnell, a presentation
    about the state tax credit by Powderhouse Productions president Tug
    Yourgrau, and production insurance info from Jerome Guerard. Details
    are at www.massprodcoalition.com.

    SILVA ON SCREEN: A lot of the time, Jeff Daniel Silva is on the
    planning side of film events: He curates the Balagan Film Series
    that's held at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. But Silva is a filmmaker,
    too, and the region is finally getting to see what audiences at MoMA
    in New York City got to view last February: his latest work.

    "Balkan Rhapsodies" will be at the Harvard Film Archive tomorrow at 7
    p.m., with Silva attending. He'll also present footage from a
    work-in-process.

    Silva says he was the first US citizen to visit Serbia in the weeks
    after the NATO bombing campaign in 1999. The people he met there, he
    says, were caught between a rock and a hard place: a government they
    didn't like and bombs that were not making their lives any easier.

    The subtitle of his film is "78 Measures of War," a reference to the
    78 days of bombings. For more details, call 617-495-4700 or visit
    www.hcl.harvard.edu/hfa.

    CONVERSATIONS WITH: Mel Stuart, director of the original "Willy Wonka
    & the Chocolate Factory," will be at the BU Cinematheque on Thursday
    and Friday at 7 both evenings. The talk will be politics, however, not
    chocolate. Thursday he'll be presenting his "Making of the President
    1960" (1963), which looked at John Kennedy's victory over Richard
    Nixon, and Friday he'll be presenting his "Making of the President
    1968" (1969), which documented Robert Kennedy's assassination, the
    Chicago riots, and marches against the war in Vietnam. That's at the
    BU College of Communication at 640 Commonwealth Avenue, Room B-05.

    German filmmaker Doris Dörrie will be at the Museum of Fine Arts on
    Friday and next Sunday, the Wasserman Cinematheque at Brandeis
    University on Saturday, and the Goethe-Institut Boston on Oct. 28 as
    part of a partial retrospective of her work presented by the
    institute. Included are a collection of her comedies and relationship
    films from 1985 through this year. Details are at
    www.goethe.de/boston.

    SCREENING OF NOTE: The Coolidge Corner Theatre's Europe's Grand Opera
    series, which presents high definition versions of current
    productions, usually meets just once a month on a Sunday morning, but
    this week there are two chances to see the featured show: "La
    Traviata" plays this morning at 11 a.m. and again tomorrow at 7
    p.m. The series is co-presented by Boston Lyric Opera. Call
    617-734-2500 or go to www.coolidge.org.

    Leslie Brokaw can be reached at [email protected].

    © Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
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