Middle East Studies

Film Screening | The Destruction of Memory

event poster

Monday, November 28, 2016

6:00pm – 8:00pm

List 120

Over the past century, cultural destruction has wrought catastrophic results across the globe. This war against culture is not over - it's been steadily increasing. In Syria and Iraq, the ‘cradle of civilization’, millennia of culture are being destroyed. The push to protect, salvage and rebuild has moved in step with the destruction. Legislation and policy have played a role, but heroic individuals have fought back, risking and losing their lives to protect not just other human beings, but our cultural identity - to save the record of who we are. Based on the book of the same name by Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory tells the whole story - looking not just at the ongoing actions of Daesh (ISIS) and at other contemporary situations, but revealing the decisions of the past that allowed the issue to remain hidden in the shadows for so many years. Interviewees in the film include the Director-General of UNESCO, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as diverse and distinguished international experts, whose voices combine to address this urgent issue.

This screening is the first event in the series, "Combating Crisis: New Responses to Cultural Heritage Preservation in the Middle East," sponsored by the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology, in collaboration with the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, the Department of Anthropology, the Cogut Center for Humanities, and Middle East Studies.

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