Apo Torosyan
Sunday, October 1, 2006
3:00 PM

Artist and filmmaker Apo Torosyan, born in Istanbul, the son of a Greek mother and an Armenian father, will present two of his documentary films, Discovering My Father's Village (2003) and Witnesses (2005). He will also share his personal experiences during the pogrom against Greeks and Armenians that took place in Istanbul, in September of 1955. 

In order to film Discovering My Father’s Village, Mr. Torosyan traveled to the Turkish village where his father was orphaned at the age of five as a result of the Armenian genocide.   Posing as a journalist, Mr. Torosyan interviewed villagers and the local historian, as well as his aging aunt—his family’s last survivor of the genocide. Opening with the words, “What little my father remembered of his childhood was taken away from him,” the documentary incorporates photographs, live footage and interviews to narrate a family’s tragic story of genocide and a son’s search for self-understanding.   Drawing on issues of ethnic persecution, immigration, dislocation and identity, the story is familiar to many – even today.

In Witnesses, Mr. Torosyan interviews two women who were eight and eleven years old at the time of the Armenian genocide.  Two of the last remaining survivors, these women share their gripping tales of tragedy and triumph.

In relating his own personal experiences, Mr. Torosyan recalls one terrifying night during the 1955 pogrom, when he was 14-years old. From a window in his family’s second floor apartment in Istanbul, he witnessed an angry mob destroying Christian-owned businesses. He later learned that this destruction was occurring all over the city and that during that night, Greek priests were being hanged from the bells of their churches and their daughters raped.  

Mr. Torosyan’s older sister, who was pregnant and at home alone with her young son, was prepared to leap with her child from the window of her fourth floor apartment if the rioters came to her door. Fortunately, they turned away when they saw a Turkish flag flying downstairs.

Since making these films and speaking in public about the Armenian genocide, the Turkish government has barred Mr. Torosyan from his homeland.

Mr. Torosyan graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul in 1968 with bachelor and master’s degrees in fine arts. That same year he immigrated to the United States, where he worked as a visual designer. He sold his own successful design company in 1986 to concentrate on his art.  Since then, he has exhibited in many solo and group shows across the United States and Europe. His work has appeared in private and corporate collections in Turkey, Greece, Spain, France, Armenia, Canada and the United States.  His works are in the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art in Tonneins, Bordeaux, France; the Armenian Library and Museum of America in Watertown; the Ararat Eskijian Museum in Los Angeles, California; the Armenian Western Diocese in Burbank, California; and the Flaten Art Museum in Northfield, Minnesota.   Mr. Torosyan is an active member of the Boston Printmakers and the International Association of Genocide Scholars.