SAVE DARFUR TEAMS WITH GRAMMY-WINNING ARTISTS ‘SYSTEM OF A DOWN’ TO ANNOUNCE THE CANNES PREMIERE OF BAND’S FEATURE DEBUT ‘SCREAMERS’

 

Cannes—Sixteen-million album-selling and Grammy award-winning band System of a Down hopes to raise awareness in conjunction with the human rights group Save Darfur, in their feature film Cannes debut tonight (May 21) in the acclaimed U.S. documentary film SCREAMERS.  SCREAMERS features seven live performances by the band as they toured Europe and American over the last two years.  The premiere will be followed by a Save Darfur invitation-only party at Cat Corner.   Featured in “Screamers” is their hit “B.Y.O.B.” (Bring Your Own Bomb), the antiwar song that opened #1 on the charts the same day in Britain, America and Japan, a unique occurrence.

 

The band has teamed with the internationally known Save Darfur organization, a coalition of more than 1,000 human rights and faith-based organizations, that has made it its mission to raise awareness and stop the unfolding tragedy in the Darfur region of Sudan, which has already cost more than 400,000 innocent lives and driven many hundreds of thousands more into exile and poverty.

 

Serj Tankian from System of a Down says, “It doesn’t matter if the first one was Armenian, or the greatest numbers were the Jews in the Holocaust, or whether it was Pol Pot or Stalin, who did it to his own people.  Genocides, we should feel, are all one.”   “I hope that the international distribution of ‘Screamers’ will help bring awareness of this urgent issue,” says director Carla Garapedian.

 

Says Ben Prochauska, national campaign manager for Save Darfur, “Thanks to the worldwide attention “Screamers” and System of a Down’s music has brought to the problem of worldwide genocide, more people now know about the reality of what’s happening in Africa than ever before.   I really hope the audience at Cannes responds as well as American audiences and critics have to this powerful film.” During “Screamers” ongoing worldwide release, publications as prestigious as MAXIM Magazine have hailed the movie as “extraordinary,” “genius” (The New York Village Voice), “powerful” (Independent), “a brilliant film -- everyone should see it” (Larry King, CNN), while the LA Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe and New York Times have all devoted considerable coverage to “Screamers” and its global human rights message.  The film also won the popular audience awards at the American Film Institute Festival in Los Angeles and the Montreal International Human Festival.

 

“Screamers scream,” says director Carla Garapedian, “and everyone should be screaming about the massive human rights injustice now occurring in Darfur.”

 

“We should all be screamers,” says System lead singer Serj Tankian.

 

Synopsis

Documentary feature examining why genocides keep occurring -- from the Armenian genocide in 1915, to the Holocaust, Bosnia, Rwanda and now Darfur -- through the eyes and music of the Grammy award-winning rock band “System of a Down,” based in Los Angeles, whose members are all grandchildren of genocide survivors.  As the band tours the world and touches on the locations and stories of genocide in the last century, the film follows the personal story of the lead singer’s grandfather, a 96-year old survivor of the Armenian genocide, one of the few remaining survivors from his village in Turkey.  With the arguments of Harvard Professor Samantha Power, the personal stories of survivors from Armenia, Rwanda and Darfur, policy critics and whistleblowers – the “screamers” – the film targets the problem of genocide denial, with specific reference to the Turkish government’s current campaign to stop its citizens from discussing the genocide.   When the band arrives back in the United States, they confront the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy in the debate on genocide recognition, with Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, actively blocking a vote in Congress.  Through the band’s efforts to get Dennis to “Do the Right Thing” and Power’s thesis that America’s interest has always been to stay neutral, no matter how wide-scale the carnage, the film shows how successive Presidents and corporate interests have conspired to turn a blind eye to genocides as they are happening – whether it be Iraqi Kurds in the 80s, Rwanda in the 90s or Darfur today.  After the Holocaust, we may say ‘never again’ -- but we don’t mean it.