Bionic Buzz® got to cover the world premiere of the documentary Motherland at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, CA. Motherland is a 90-minute documentary feature film about Azerbaijan’s, Turkey’s unprovoked genocidal attack and ethnic cleansing against Armenians of Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, starting on September 27, 2020. Azerbaijan with the declared assistance from Turkey reawakened the conflict from dormancy by launching a large-scale offensive against Artsakh. In its war effort, Azerbaijan relied on thousands of Turkish-paid jihadist mercenaries airlifted from terrorist camps in Syria, Libya, and Pakistan, and brought to fight alongside the Azerbaijani Army. The 2020 invasion opened a new chapter in the history of regional warfare and involved unmatched suffering of the civilian population. For 44 days, the world largely watched in deafening silence as over 4,000 Armenians were massacred.
It took 106 years before the United States formally recognized the Armenian Genocide of 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. On April 24,2021, President Joe Biden became the first US president to officially recognize the Armenian genocide and to recommit preventing such an atrocity from occurring again. Tragically, history is repeating itself with Turkey’s ongoing genocidal attack and ethnic cleansing against Armenians as we’ve witnessed recently in Artsakh. “Motherland” tells the story of this ongoing tragic chapter through the lens of Armenian-American journalist and LGBTQ+ activist, Vic Gerami.
With illegal and banned weapons, including cluster bombs and white phosphorus munitions, the aggressors destroyed towns and villages, indiscriminately killed people mainly between the ages of 18-21, and occupied approximately 80% of Artsakh.
By November 9, 2020, when a new ceasefire was declared, 100,000 people, 2/3 of Artsakh’s population was driven out of their ancestral land and made refugees. Despite calls from bipartisan Congress members to intervene, most of the world stayed silent. Many nations, mainly in Europe, are heavily invested in Azerbaijan’s oil and gas and the Caspian pipeline that delivers it to Europe.
Through a journalist and activist’s lens, Motherland focuses the world’s attention on the atrocities, war crimes, and crimes against humanity committed by Azerbaijan and Turkey against Artsakh and Armenia. It chronicles the struggle of the Armenian people to come to terms with its fate, mourn the loss of almost 5,000 people, and pick up the pieces and carry on as they have for millennia. It includes interviews with war heroes, displaced refugees, American and Armenian high-profile elected officials, and ordinary people.
The film also accounts for the apathy of the greater world community, the hypocrisy of public figures who preach about human rights but show inaction when reality hits, and how the press is easily manipulated by a rogue nation’s campaign of hate, disinformation, and propaganda.
On the red carpet, our host Rachael Fisher got to interview, Vic Gerami (Writer, Director & Producer), Jeffrey Prang (LA County Assessor), Nicole Goesseringer Mij (Publicist & Writer), Henrick Vartanian (Producer), Chris Damadyan (editor), Oshin Hartootoonian, John Dennem, Judy Chu (Congresswoman), Eric Strong (LA Sheriff Candidate), Mitch O’Farrell (LA Council Member), Shant Sahakian and Kat Kramer (actress & producer).