Maria Vardanyan

Grandma's Tattoos is a powerful documentary that reveals the fate of thousands of forgotten women, mostly teenagers and young girls, who survived the 1915 Armenian Genocide but were forced into prostitution by their captors. Many of these women were tattooed as a permanent mark of their status.

A family story that reveals the fate of the Armenian women driven out of Ottoman Turkey during the First World War. The story of "Grandma's Tattoos" is a personal film about what happened to many Armenian women during the genocide In 1919, just at the end of World War I, the Allied forces reclaimed 90,819 Armenian young girls and children who, during the war years, were forced to become prostitutes to survive, or had given birth to children after forced or arranged marriages or rape. Many of these women were tattooed as a sign that they belonged to abductor. European and American missionaries organized help and saved thousands of refugees who were later scattered all over the world to places like Beirut, Marseille, and Fresno.Director Suzanne Khardalian

1870's America. A Chinese immigrant falsely accused of murdering a white woman is viciously hunted down; he'll have to prove his innocence in a time when people of color had "no legal rights" and could be bought and sold for a profit. Railroad to Hell: A Chinaman's Chance explores the exploitation of Chinese workers during the building of American railroads. The workers not only spent long hours, but the work was often dangerous and fatal. The Chinaman is a fugitive on the run, and all odds are against him. While stealing a horse was a hanging offense in the Old West, our fugitive knows that killing a Chinaman is not a crime.