Defensible as learning, or reminding, Screamers nevertheless comes up short judged as film, depending of course on alternative statements of purpose for that slippery last word. Entertainment? Bottom line? Education? Social change? Or, more reasonably, some combination? Socially committed LA documentarian Carla Garapedian’s effort would be better suited to a sixty-minute TV slot. This is not to denigrate the result but to question if the general public will buy tickets as well as whether or not this work qualifies as film, movie, cinema. I think the answer is “no” in both cases, as merely being on celluloid or tape does not make something a film.

Although the term genocide was not coined until 1944, by Polish Raphael Lemkin for what would become known as the Holocaust, and was included in the United Nations indictment of twenty-four Nazi officials, the act is occurring at this very moment and often has been human practice.  From an immediate headshot “people are being butchered, we can stop it” from professor-author Samantha Power, and unembellished repetitions throughout by her and others, the thesis is not so much developed as preached.

To “tell the story of my own people” the director uses as starting point the flashpoint of 1915, when decades of pogroms culminated in “the Armenian massacres.” Citing inroads made by Protestant missionaries and the half-truth of the northeastern ethnic group’s aiding World War I Russian invaders, the decaying Turkish-led Ottoman Empire killed, brutalized and starved over six hundred thousand Armenians in forced deportation to Syria and Mesopotamia. U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau’s horrified reports were ignored for political reasons, Ankara’s support against Bolsheviks and then Communists, for weapons sales, military bases, and nice tourist destinations.

This international production’s vehicle to carry the ball is at first surprising, for it’s the platinum-selling Grammy-winning band, System of a Down. In cutting back time and again to concert footage of audiences and tour footage of the Heavy Metal trappings group, the film emphasizes the shouted, obscenity-larded socially conscious lyrics, and even backdrops, of performances. In less frenetic interviews, the four California components of Armenian ancestry are engaging and articulate in their dedication to bringing awareness to a rising generation. Singer/spokesman Serj Tankian is particularly impressive, when he occasionally sings low, speaks to the media, addresses evasive politicians in Batavia, Illinois, and Washington, D.C., or cares for his ninety-six-year-old genocide-survivor grandfather.

Amidst dozens of inserts of advocates for official recognition of the attempted Armenian extermination, of powerful politicians who promise one thing and do another, of brutal news footage from liberated German concentration camps, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kurdistan, Darfur, the backbone argument is expounded: Hitler’s 1939 rationale, “who remembers the Armenians?” is being re-enacted on a daily, deadly basis in the here and now because the international community refuses to brand, condemn and act against savagery, the effect of which recognition would be to break the chain by putting the fear of God and justice into the butchers.

Band member John Dolmayan wonders if “anyone cares about the twenty-five million Native Americans killed” or about his own forebears, and answers, “I do.” It would be to spread the ninety-one minutes too thin to go into the Roma (Gypsies), or further -- Moabites and Philistines, Homeric Trojans, Tasmanians, Guanches and Canarios, Caribs, Tainos, Arawaks, Pacific Islanders, and an endless etcetera of conquered and/or colonized peoples.

Screamers has been described as “intense,” and that it is. Passionate to its cause and, as a creative effort, selective in aligning its targets, it does leave out such facts as that the Kurds participated in the 1915 rape of Anatolia and that China and Russia (i.e., not only the U.S.) have denied International Criminal Court jurisdiction.

Such omissions do not, however, detract from the fervent “message.” But what is left in the end is screed, as opposed to film. One questions if the adolescent fans who sway raised hands at Brixton Academy -- the between-sex venue of Michael Winterbottom’s vacuous 9 Songs -- deeply carry away more than another concert tribal experience. Power-Rock System of a Down are unusually men of good will, but their type of music will not draw a broad public. Defined as “policy critics and whistleblowers,” the word screamers applies equally to the for-fans-only performances. Roots and Holocaust will have proved infinitely more effective in “moving . . . a mass audience otherwise uninterested.”

Even so inadequate and uninformed a writer as Harriet Beecher Stowe sensed that her history-changing novel of life among the lowly needed to be grounded in just plain old story. 

(Released Maya Releasing and rated R” for disturbing images of genocide and language.)