Armenian-American documentary filmmaker J. Michael Hagopian, whose 70 educational and documentary films have won more than 160 national and international awards, including two Emmy nominations, died Dec. 10 in his Thousand Oaks, Calif., home. He was 97.
Funeral services will be held Wednesday, Dec. 15, at 2 p.m. in Samuelson Chapel on the campus of California Lutheran University, 60 W. Olsen Rd., Thousand Oaks.
Hagopian was a Genocide survivor who dedicated his life to the visual documentation of the Turkish extermination of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915. Over a 40-year period, he filmed nearly 400 interviews of survivors of and witnesses to the Armenian Genocide, traveling around the world to record their accounts in 10 languages. He established the Armenian Film Foundation in 1979 as a non-profit, educational, and cultural organization dedicated to the documentation in motion pictures of Armenian heritage and life.
The last film Hagopian wrote, directed and produced was The River Ran Red, a 58-minute documentary that opened the Eighth Annual Arpa International Film Festival on Oct. 24, 2008, at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, Calif. The River Ran Red, the third film in a trilogy about the Genocide, was voted Best International Historical Documentary by the New York International Film & Video Festival in 2009 and won many other awards.
Several of Hagopian’s films were produced under grants from the U.S. Office of Education and the Ethnic Heritage Program, the MacArthur Foundation, California Endowment for the Humanities, Milken Foundation and California State Department of Education.
Hagopian received numerous honors, including Jewish World Watch’s “I Witness” Award for dedicating his professional life to chronicling the Armenian Genocide, the Arpa Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Armin T. Wegner Humanitarian Award. The Armenian National Committee has honored him as Man of the Year twice, once in 1984 and again in 2000, Asbarez.com reported.
