HyeOctane

“Screamers,” a documentary/concert film that begins by focusing on the Armenian genocide of 1915 and broadens to include mass exterminations from the Holocaust on, tries to both give witness and provide an answer. Mixing concert footage of the Armenian-American rock group System of a Down–whose hypnotic protest ballads supply the “screamers” of the title–with interviews and archive footage detailing genocides throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries, director Carla Garapedian makes us face again the appalling consequences of untrammeled political dictatorship and of murder as a public policy.