The films’ focus will be on mass atrocities committed against Armenians 100 years ago, which are not legally recognized by the current Turkish government as genocide.

“These movies bring up really important questions that we want to ask the PSU community,” said Tavi Gupta, director of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Project at PSU. “The Armenian Genocide is a hinge-point for all three movies we are playing this year.”

After each film there will be a discussion with the audience about the issues brought up. The first movie, Screamers, will play on April 9 in Smith Memorial Student Union.Screamers is a 2007 documentary that follows the band System of a Down while they spread information about modern genocides and how the Armenian genocide, begun in 1915, has influenced the way current genocide can be defined or ignored.

The second movie, and most acclaimed of the three, Watchers of the Sky, won two 2014 Sundance Film Festival awards, a Monadnock International Film Festival award and Best Documentary at the Jerusalem Film Festival. It will show April 14 at the NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium.

Watchers of the Sky follows the life of Raphael Lemkin—a Polish Jew who lost many friends and family in the Holocaust—on his journey to find legal recognition of those crimes and others like them. Lemkin eventually coined the word genocide.

The third film, AGHET: Ein Völkermord, will be showing on April 23. It is a 2010 documentary specifically about the Armenian Genocide with never-before-seen footage and documents on the historic telling of the mass atrocity, and of the current Turkish government’s refusal, since World War I to classify the events as genocide.

“Currently, 22 countries and 43 states within the USA recognize the Armenian Genocide,” Gupta said.