Grandma's Tattoos (2011) watch online HD

A family story that reveals the fate of the Armenian women driven out of Ottoman Turkey during the First World War. The story of "Grandma's Tattoos" is a personal film about what happened to many Armenian women during the genocide In 1919, just at the end of World War I, the Allied forces reclaimed 90,819 Armenian young girls and children who, during the war years, were forced to become prostitutes to survive, or had given birth to children after forced or arranged marriages or rape. Many of these women were tattooed as a sign that they belonged to abductor. European and American missionaries organized help and saved thousands of refugees who were later scattered all over the world to places like Beirut, Marseille, and Fresno.Director Suzanne Khardalian

This compact, one-hour documentary made by Suzanne Khardalian is the filmmaker's personal journey to an understanding the past of her grandmother, a victim of the Armenian genocide.

As a child growing up in Beirut, Khardalian formed an impression of her grandmother as cold and withdrawn, incapable of affection, and stamped with "weird" blue tattoos on her face and hands. But it was not until she reached adulthood that Khardalian made the attempt to reconstruct the past life of her grandmother.

Khardalian discovered a set of Near East Case Notes (1919-26), which provided clues to her grandmother's past and that of other Armenian women in the aftermath of World War I. But it was primarily through interviews with family members that Khardalian finally unlocked the secrets to her grandmother's story.

While interviewing her mother in Beirut and her great aunt in Los Angeles, Khardalian captures on film the women's reluctance to talk about the past. When asked about the atrocities committed against Armenians, the women's demeanor completely changed, and they grew silent. "It's enough to say the children did it," says the great aunt. "Let's leave it at that." Of course, it was not "the children" who etched the tattoos into the women, but their captors who had enslaved them as concubines and used the tattoos as signs of ownership.

The women's silence goes a long way in explaining what journalist Vicken Cheterian describes as "nine decades" of "dead silence" about the Armenian genocide. While Cheterian focuses on political repression and censorship that contributed to the silence, Khardalian's film explores what might be called "the silence of shame," wherein the atrocities committed against her grandmother and great aunt were suppressed in a shame-based family system. The combination of the government's enforced silence and the multi-generational pattern of withholding the personal experiences within families added up to a lethal pattern of expunging truth about the Armenian genocide from the historical record.

Finally, Khardalian is able break down the barriers of her mother, who recounts the circumstances of the rape of the grandmother as a child, who was subsequently held in captivity as a teenage concubine, prior to her release in Beirut in 1922. At age nineteen, the grandmother began to slowly rebuild her life. Khardalian now realizes in hindsight that her grandmother "was alive, but she was a walking corpse."

The attempt of the grandmother to spare her family members emotional pain through the repression of her shame left the impressionable granddaughter in a confused state about "the devilish signs from a dark world" tattooed on her grandmother's face and hands. It was an act of courage on the part of the filmmaker to break the silence through peeling away the layers of the unspeakable.