Thriller '1915' to HIt Theaters & VOD This April

Synopsis:

Exactly 100 years after the Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Turkey, a mysterious director (Simon Abkarian) is staging a play at the Los Angeles Theatre to honor the victims of that tragedy - a horrifying crime forgotten and denied for an entire century. But as protesters surround his theatre, and a series of strange accidents spread panic among his producer (Jim Piddock) and actors (Angela Sarafyan, Sam Page, Nikolai Kinski), it appears that the director's mission is profoundly dangerous, and the ghosts of THE PAST are everywhere.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND:

On April 24, 1915, in Constantinople (now Istanbul), the capital of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, hundreds of Armenian community leaders, clergymen, and intellectuals were rounded up and slaughtered in the night. During the summer of 1915, under cover of world war, Turkish soldiers escorted millions of unarmed civilian Armenians out of the towns and villages in which they had been living for thousands of years. The systematic deportation and slaughter of the Armenian people was accomplished. The word "genocide" did not yet exist.

International news accounts, photographs, and official government archives undeniably confirmed what then US Ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, witnessed and called a "campaign of race extermination." Legal scholar Raphael Lemkin coined the word "genocide" and himself applied it to the Armenian case. The government of Turkey began its century-long denial of the Armenian Genocide, but the survivors and their descendants across the world countered with a quest for recognition, restitution, and justice.

In September 1992, Armenia's foreign minister Raffi K. Hovannisian (also the Executive Producer of "1915" and father of the film's director Garin Hovannisian), defied the Genocide taboo and called the "Armenian Genocide" by name at a Council of Europe summit in Istanbul. In June 2005, the Turkish government enacted Article 301, which made it a crime to "insult Turkishness," which included discussing the Armenian Genocide. Turkey's own Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, Armenian intellectual-journalist Hrant Dink, and others were prosecuted for this crime. In 2007, Dink was murdered in broad daylight in front of his newspaper offices in Istanbul.

The Armenian Genocide remains one of the most important unresolved global socio-political issues in world history and it will become even more important in the months surrounding its 100th anniversary on April 24, 2015. "1915" is about the danger of denial, not just of historical events, but also of the uncomfortable truths hidden in our own private pasts.