NEW FILM FOLLOWS A WITNESS TO HISTORY US AMBASSADOR REPORTED GENOCIDE OF THE ARMENIANS
by Leslie Brokaw
The Boston Globe
October 19, 2008 Sunday
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
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
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
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 Dorrie 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
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