Museum are partnering to present a film screening of Tim Slade’s The Destruction of Memory on Saturday, April 15, 2017 at 2:00 PM.

The event will include the screening and a panel discussion with Tim Slade, Andras Riedlmayer of Harvard University, and Joesph Greene of the Semitic Museum, and will be held as the Museum’s annual Genocide commemoration event for 2017.

Based on the book of the same name by Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory tells the story of the cultural destruction associated with Genocide that has caused and is still causing catastrophic results across the globe.

As organizations at the forefront of preserving cultural identities, the Armenian Museum of America and the Semitic Museum are thrilled to give our visitors access to more information on cultural destruction.

The film explores the ongoing actions of ISIS and other modern situations of cultural destruction, as well as the decisions of the past that allowed this issue to remain hidden in the shadows for years.

The war against culture is not over, and unfortunately it has been steadily increasing. However, heroic individuals have fought back, risking and losing their lives to project not just other human beings, but cultural identities.

Film Director Tim Slade

Interviewees in the film include the Director-General of UNESCO, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as a number of diverse and distinguished international experts, such as Andras Riedlmayer, whose voices combine to address this urgent issue.

Tim Slade’s films have screened throughout North and South America, the UK, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand on television, at film festivals and theatrically. His films have screened at more than 70 international film festivals and a number of his films have won or been nominated for awards across the globe.

Andras Riedlmayer
          Harvard University

Andràs Riedlmayer directs the Documentation Center of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University. A specialist in the history, art and cultures of the Ottoman Empire, he has spent much of the past 25 years documenting the destruction of cultural heritage in the Balkan wars of the 1990s and he has testified about his findings before the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

In 2006, he was an expert witness in the genocide casse brought by Bosnia against Serbia before the International Court of Justice. During his time as president of the Turkish Studies Association, Riedlmayer worked with Society for Armenian Studies President Richard Hovannisian to organize a joint panel at an international conference on Middle East studies in Montréal.

    Joseph Greene
  Semitic Museum

Joeseph A. Greene is the Deputy Director and Curator of the Semitic Museum of Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. inarchaeology in 1986 at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and completed eight seasons of fieldwork in Carthage (Tunisia), directing the Carthage Survey from 1980 to 1983.