The Fresno Premiere Screening of the “Armenians, The Hidden Grandmothers”

FRESNO — The Armenian Studies Program and the Fresno State CineCulture program are presenting the Fresno premiere screening of the film “Armenians, The Hidden Grandmothers,” at 5:30PM on Friday, March 27, 2026. The screening is free and open to the public and will be held in the Leon S. and Pete P. Peters Educational Center, 5010 N. Woodrow Ave. (west end of the SaveMart Center), on the Fresno State campus.

Director Alexandra Routhiau Mikaélian, French of Armenian origin, made a promise to her grandfather, to find the members of their family in Turkey based on a simple name, Shahimé, this sister he was never able to meet. From this journey through time in search of the living, Alexandra will lift the veil of one of the most deeply rooted taboos in Turkish society, those for which you still risk your life.

This story is the story of these millions of Armenians and Turks, those we call the “hidden Armenians” or the “remnants of the sword,” descendants of women and children converted and forcibly integrated into the Turkish population during the Armenians genocide. For the first time, we tell the missing stories of these women, victims of the genocide, the Armenian grandmothers who passed on their stories by whispering.

As the writer and lawyer Féthiye Cetin, who appears in the film, explains: “Every Turk discovers that he may have Armenian blood in his veins and every Armenian, including in the diaspora, realizes that he may have Muslim cousins in Turkey.”

111 years after the events of 1915, it is time to open the book of this common history in a documentary but above all the doors of silence, to finally be able to wound together and build bridges towards reconciliation.

Alexandra Routhiau Mikaélian is a French writer, director, and producer of Armenian descent. After ten years as a journalist for French national television channels, she attended “La Fémis school” and began creating and producing her own documentaries. Now as a documentary filmmaker, she focuses her work on the memory of the Armenian diaspora. A form of film therapy framed by the intersection of family stories and universal History. Beyond emotions, her cinema pursues the dream of making films that bring people together and build bridges between peoples.

For more information about the film screening please contact the Armenian Studies Program at 278-2669, visit the CineCulture website, https://cineculture.csufresno.edu/films/, or visit our Facebook page at @ArmenianStudiesFresnoState.