Commissioned Work: Survival Pictures: The Promise

In 2014, the filmmakers at Survival Pictures decided to invite a photojournalist onto the set of their film The Promise. The film, which starred Oscar Isaac and Christian Bale, centered on the events surrounding the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the resulting resistance at Musa Dagh that saved the lives of 4,200 Armenian villagers, including my own relatives.  

These images cover just a few weeks of filming - a fraction of the time they spent making The Promise. Years of painstaking research had gone into making every element of the film as accurate as possible from the script to the props to the costumes worn by hundreds of extras. The filmmakers, seeing echos of the Genocide in current day events, were curious - what would happen if they threw a photojounalist in the mix to document the film, not as a fiction or history, but as if it was happening now.