I was a young girl when my family moved to Anjar, a small Armenian village in the Bekka Valley in Lebanon near the Syrian border. Moving to Anjar from the capital Beirut was a big shock. Anjar felt boring at first. It was only years later I realized how fortunate I am to have had a childhood in Anjar, among Armenian heroes.

   Over the first years as I got to know the elders in the village, I got to hear their stories about their old homeland Musa Dagh, currently Turkey. I got to know most of the Musa Dagh traditions, from cooking to dancing, to wedding ceremonies and hunting expeditions. At that time Anjar became a happy place with grandmothers and grandfathers who told great stories. It was only in the year 1978-79 when hundreds of Armenian refugees from across Lebanese escaping the civil war came to Anjar, I realized that life was not always happy.

   At the age of eight I suddenly had to grow up. I found out that all the elders in my village had lived through a war years ago when they were children my age. And "now” with the Lebanese Civil War in 1979, they were reliving the horrors of the 1915 Armenian genocide. They were having flashbacks.

   That summer I learned all about the Armenian Genocide. I found out that my grandparents had survived as children. I realized that I was a third generation survivor. Every day the Civil War raged in 1979, through the elders of Anjar I relived the Genocide of 1915. At times I was confused between the wars and the stories. For an 8-year-old girl, they both seemed to be taking place at the same time.

   Most of my life I felt victimized. For me, being born Armenian was a melancholic life sentence. Feeling hopeless about the concept of fairness, I was a non-believer in justice. Because being Armenian is being an Armenian genocide survivors’ descendant. A huge responsibility to carry their memory, their pain, their stories and their disappointment in justice. The feeling of abandonment by the entire world has been deeply implanted in my soul and made me very sad.

   I tried many things, even playing a role in the film Ararat in a scene depicting the exact same fate of my maternal great grandmother Khatoun who was raped and killed. I guess somehow I hoped it would purge me like some sort of drama therapy. But only when I learned of the passing of my favourite granny in Anjar, did I realize I had to change my perspective. Yes the Turks tried to exterminate the Armenians, they murdered one and half million of us, but they failed. We are here and we live.

   My film "ANJAR” tells the story of triumph over adversity. It’s the story of the the brave Armenians of Musa Dagh who lived through epic stories of resistance battles and wars. Five thousand Armenian villagers resisted the Turkish deportation order. They climbed Musa Mountain, put up a fierce resistance with their hunting guns, fought for 40 days and eventually were rescued by the Allied French warship Guichen. They being moved around for years, they finally settled in Lebanon and built the village Anjar, the town where I grew up. These brave people of Musa Dagh are forever immortalized in the New York Times best seller THE FORTY DAYS Of MUSA DAGH novel by Franz Werfel. But to me, these people were my Nenes and Baboogs, my grannies and grandpas. My neighbours. My people. They survived the genocide. They lived, and they are part of my life. With "ANJAR” I celebrate 100 years of survival.