Winner 2012: Lusine Sahakyan

Lusine Sahakyan is a professor of Turkic Studies at Yerevan State University in Armenia. Author of three books Dr. Sahakyan spent two years making “Hamshen at Crossroads of Past and Present”, a film dedicated to the current state of the descendants of the Armenians of Hamshen, a people who were forcibly Islamicized (”Turkified”) by the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century.

The film explores the practice of forced Islamization, as a form of ethnic cleansing.

Lusine received the prestigious Armin T. Wegner Humanitarian Award at the 15th Annual Arpa International Film Festival on December 2, 2012.