From a survivor to the screamers

To understand the new documentary "Screamers," you have to understand, first, about the 97-year-old man who lives in an Armenian old folk's home in Mission Hills. His name is Stepan Haytayan; he is the grandfather of Serj Tankian, the lead singer of System of a Down, one of the world's most critically acclaimed rock bands.

Haytayan is a survivor of the first genocide of the 20th century -- the extermination by Turks of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians -- which was the granddaddy, if you will, of all modern genocides, cited sometimes by historians as direct inspiration for Adolf Hitler and indirectly for Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic, and the murderers of Rwanda and Darfur. This is the inescapable reality that informs the music and activism of System of a Down, a Los Angeles band whose four Armenian American members are all grandchildren of genocide survivors. Haytayan's moving accounts of the destruction visited on his family and Tankian's tender interactions with his frail grandfather lend a hopeful poignancy to the film, helping balance both the images of human annihilation and the band's hard-edged vibe.

The film's title has a double meaning: "Screamers" refers both to the band's propulsive musical style and, as used by Harvard professor Samantha Power, who is interviewed in the film, to people who force the world to acknowledge atrocities that it would often rather ignore.

System of a Down is well known for its activism -- using its performances to educate fans, appearing at annual demonstrations in front of the Turkish consulate in Los Angeles and supporting a congressional resolution to officially designate as genocide the atrocities visited upon Armenians around 1915 in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. In their concerts, Tankian also demands onstage that the Turkish government acknowledge that what happened was genocide (which it has so far refused to do).

The movie comes at a time when these events, nearly a century old, are back in focus on the global stage, as Turkey attempts to gain admission to the European Union. In October, the French National Assembly passed a measure making it a crime to deny that Armenians had suffered a "genocide." Also in October, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who had been charged with "public denigrating of Turkish identity" for publicly discussing the massacre of Armenians, won the Nobel Prize for literature.