SCREAMERS, directed by Carla Garapedian, is about the Grammy-award winning rock band System of a Down.
The rockers - expected to attend the Thursday, November 2, 9:45 PM screening of SCREAMERS - have a personal agenda in their music. They confront the issue of the Armenian genocide in Turkey in 1915 and the efforts by the Turkish government to deny it.
"I live in London, and there is nothing more sobering than riding to work on a subway train early Sunday morning, with no one but the driver.
"One Sunday in March 2000, though, a change. A man sitting across from me, reading The Observer, with the headline. 'Revealed: Russia's Worst War Crime in Chechnya.'
"My ears turned pink. That was my story. My war crime. My documentary.
"What did he think? Had he heard about it? Was he intrigued? Shocked?
"I was so close to asking but couldn't. It was too early, and I was afraid all I would discover was his intense desire to buy another Starbucks.
"After all, no one had covered this story. Most foreign journalists had pulled out of that war zone. Why cover a war no one cared about? Especially if Vladimir Putin was suddenly the West's new best friend?
"I was there with my team. And the only reason anyone knew about that war crime was because we were there, because Channel 4 TV in the UK had paid for us to go to Chechnya to see if the story were true. That was the channel's brief: to make documentaries about stories that few knew about.
"Putin was saying, 'No war crimes in Chechnya. No white-flag refugee convoy was bombed by Russian planes.'
"I saw the devastation first-hand and talked to the eyewitnesses. I saw the flame-torched women. The story was true - and the pictures told the lie.
"That's the power of a political documentary.
"No famine in North Korea? Food aid is getting through? There was Madeleine Albright, in Pyongyang, in an orphanage with well-fed North Korean children. Who could tell otherwise?
"How about us, with our secret cameras in North Korean villages? Showing starving orphans, right next to sacks marked 'US FOOD AID' being sold on the black market in a village outside the capital.
"That was not a story that could be encompassed in a three-minute news report.
"Did that documentary, CHILDREN OF THE SECRET STATE have an effect?
"The country's leader, Kim Jong Il, thought it did. According to South Korean intelligence he put a execution order on our North Korean cameraman. He probably never saw the film. Most of the world probably didn't see that film. But the few that did got a picture of a reality that would have been otherwise unfathomable.
"The truth is, it is so easy to lie in an information vacuum. After all, what sane person would try to sneak into North Korea? Or Chechnya? Or Afghanistan under the Taliban for that matter?
"The effects can be out of all proportion to what the filmmaker expects. My work has almost exclusively been in foreign countries, with subjects that require access to difficult places.
"In this respect, the information gap is bigger and governments get away with murder, literally, by being able to stop filmmakers from bearing witness.
"That's why when we do get in and show what is there the impact can be immense. It is the power of revelation.
"One day a parcel came in the post to the production company I was working for London.
"It was footage of a woman being executed in a football stadium by the Taliban government, filmed secretly by women.
"The women heard we made documentaries about human rights subjects and sent the tape to us. Hoping we'd look. Hoping we'd listen.
"That tape became a beacon. Producer Cassian Harrison went to the country undercover and made a film about it called BENEATH THE VEIL. It came out in Britain in August 2001 on the commercial channel, Channel 4.
"Despite the exclusive footage, it only showed in Britain. We did not make a U.S. sale for that documentary.
"After all: Afghanistan? August 2001? Who cared about that country?
"One month later, after September 11, it was all change.
"CNN bought the film and showed it every weekend for a month, over and over again. (So many times, the profit helped our company build a small school).
"Then what happened? You could say the Bush administration had its own beacon. They invaded.
"Did that film help them do it? You decide.
"Was it made with that goal in mind? Of course not.
"But it did shock the Western world, and in turn, added fuel to the fire.
"I made the sequel a year later, LIFTING THE VEIL, which to my surprise showed nothing had changed, even after the Taliban was defeated.
"Women were still being beaten and treated like animals. That's what the film showed.
"CNN did not want to buy that film.
"With SCREAMERS the goal was different. No exclusive pictures. No power of revelation.
"It is a didactic film which tries to show some of the reasons why genocides repeat, why we say 'never again' but don't seem to mean it.
"If, after seeing the film people feel called upon to do something then that would be a bonus. But it's not the first goal.
"The first goal is to put up a mirror and say, 'this is who we are.' Leave people to decide what to do next.
"Maybe some will want to get involved by supporting a group who is trying to stop genocide now in Darfur. Maybe some will feel connected to the people they see in the film. Maybe they will want to do nothing.
"I'd like to think, though, that if people sit through these 90 minutes, they won't be quite the same again. I certainly am not.
"Political action starts with knowledge. And once it's out of the bag, who's to say the effect?
"In America, we have entered a kind of 'golden age' of documentary, where people are willing now more than ever to be persuaded by this visual format.
"With the rise of the Internet, fragmented media markets and shrinking news bureaus, political documentaries have risen in status, with filmmaker-auteurs becoming the new court jesters.
"These films have fallen into a feature-film way to knock people over the heads - sideways, without it hurting too much - as a form of entertainment, not news.
"That carries with it its own challenges.
"For better or worse, though, audiences are showing they are willing to at least hear what the filmmaker has to say. For now, at least, we've have the platform.
"Is it worth it? I think so. I would rather have one man in a subway train sleepily noting that story in the Observer, than a hundred not knowing about the story at all.
"We all have the right to know.
- Carla Garapedian, Director, SCREAMERS (October 2006)
SCREAMERS screens Thursday, November 2, 9:45 PM, and Friday November 3, 2:30 PM. Members of System of a Down are expected to attend the November 2 screening.
