(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)April 15, 2013

(MAHWAH, NJ) – Eric Hachikian screened his documentary “Voyage to Amasia” at Ramapo College of New Jersey on April 15. The program was sponsored by the Center for Holocaust and the Genocide Studies and Communication Arts’ Cinematheque Series.

Amasia, Turkey is the town where Eric’s grandmother, Helen Shushan, was born.  In 1915, when she was 40 days old, the Ottoman government exiled Helen and her family and most of the other Armenians in Amasia and forced them to walk south towards the Syrian Desert.  This was just one instance in a systematic Ottoman campaign to deport and execute Armenians.  An estimated 1 to 1.5 million Armenians died between 1915 and 1923 in what was the first genocide of the 20th century — the Armenian Genocide.

Helen and her family miraculously survived and eventually reached the United States.  When Eric was growing up, Helen told him the stories about Amasia that she had heard from her mother. She told him it was the most beautiful place in the world.

When Helen died in 2004, Eric, a composer and musician, created “Voyage to Amasia” as an imagined musical journey with his grandmother to a place they both only knew through stories and photographs.  When the piece premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2005, filmmaker Randy Bell suggested that, using the music as an inspiration and guide, the two make a real voyage to Amasia.

In exploring modern-day Turkey and Armenia, including a village settled by refugees from Amasia, the film traces a path through the past, simultaneously revealing Helen Shushan’s fate and the story of how the Armenian Genocide continues to affect the people of today’s Turkey and Armenia.

Eric Hachikian is an Armenian-American composer whose compositions and orchestrations can be heard in a variety of major motion pictures, network television shows, and national ad campaigns.  A classically-trained composer, as well as a self-taught DJ and perpetual student of world music, Eric’s musical style has no boundaries, and his multi-genre interests result in a unique and personal sound.

Eric studied Nadia Boulanger’s methods in Paris, France, and has also studied composition and audio engineering at the Aspen and Tanglewood Music Festivals, as well as at Northwestern University and Oberlin Conservatory. He received his Bachelor of Music with highest honors from the University of Michigan, and his Master of Arts from New York University.

Randy Bell is a Washington, D.C.-based independent filmmaker. His documentary films, which explore subjects as diverse as American popular music, mid-century European modernist architecture, and the AIDS orphan crisis in Kenya, have won awards from the Cleveland International Film Festival, the New England Film and Video Festival, and the Ivy Film Festival. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the African Studies Association, and Harvard University have honored them, and they have been screened on television, at film festivals, independent movie theaters, and universities internationally. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University in 2000, and his Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in 2010.

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