Ottawa hosting special lecture, film screening to remember Hrant Dink

PanARMENIAN.Net - Voices in Dialogue, a non-profit initiative based in Ottawa, on Saturday, January 21 is holding the Hrant Dink Memorial Lecture on Freedom of Speech and Peacebuilding to celebrate the life and commemorate the legacy of Dink who was assassinated in Istanbul on January 19, 2007.

"Dink’s vision of dialogue and understanding among communities with traumas of violence derives from the power of bearing witness and speaking the truth," ViD said in a statement.

"His life provides a source of inspiration for a politics of building peace that takes shape against the backdrop of struggles for social justice in general and the recognition of the Armenian Genocide in particular. At a time when freedom of speech is under threat globally, especially in Dink’s home country Turkey, which has the world’s highest number of journalists in jail and academics expelled from their universities, the memorial lecture series aims to build a platform for the expression of ideas that trace the points of contact between the freedom of speech and aspirations for peace and justice."

2017 Hrant Dink Memorial Lecture will be given by Ariel Salzmann (Associate Professor, History, Quenn’s University) with title “Rights, Wrongs, and the Writing of Anatolian Histories.”

A special film screening will feature Canada premiere of the documentary “The Other Side of Home” (directed by Nare Mkrtchyan) which follows the journeys of two brave women Nare and Maya, an Armenian filmmaker and a Turkish schoolteacher whose lives have been defined by what happened over 100 years ago.

The film is one of the 10 shortlisted documentary shorts competing for an Academy Award nomination this year.