A Visual Presentation and Lecture By Eric Nazarian

16 December 2024 Monday
18:30-20:00 (UTC+3)
Venue: Hrant Dink Foundation Anarad Hığutyun Building
Papa Roncalli Street, No:128, Harbiye, Şişli/İstanbul

Between 1895 and 1915, the motion picture industry bloomed across Europe and the United States, ushering in a revolutionary new era of image-making that would lead to the birth of Hollywood and the world film industry. This period also witnessed the decline of the Ottoman Empire in tandem with the 20th century’s First World War. The rapidly advancing evolution of motion picture technology spread across the United States and Europe as a new generation of image-makers and cinematographers started documenting the world visually and ushering in a new era of storytelling for the movies.

The first part of Celluloid Exiles explores the origins of cinema during the Industrial Revolution and it’s impact on the first mainstream Hollywood movie about Armenians during the silent film era. The second part of the presentation focuses on the landmark filmmakers and films that surfaced from post-World War 1 Soviet Union, Europe and the United States, and their immediate and long-term influences on the Armenian odyssey in world cinema and popular culture today.

Eric Nazarian

Eric Nazarian is a filmmaker and screenwriter, an honors graduate of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, and a recipient of the Nicholl Fellowship for his screenplay Giants. His debut feature, The Blue Hour, starring Alyssa Milano, won multiple awards at international film festivals. He co-wrote Three Christs, starring Richard Gere and Peter Dinklage, and directed Tatanka, a film about the MMIW crisis, which premiered at the Rome Film Festival.
In addition to his filmmaking, Nazarian is a photojournalist whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and MovieMaker. He is currently finishing Die Like a Man, a film about gun violence in L.A.'s Westside, and has developed a grassroots filmmaking program to combat gun violence. Recently, he was selected for Marcus Lyon’s Alta / A Human Atlas of a City of Angels project, which will premiere at the Getty in 2024.