The Nancy Tafeen Global Film Series

The theme of this year’s series is “Through a Female Lens”

“Throughout the world, the male-dominated field of film directing is slowly changing. Women are writing, directing and producing more films than ever before. Our series will highlight four outstanding examples of a feminine perspective being brought to cinematic storytelling.” — Dale Pollock

All films in the series feature an introduction and a post-film Q&A with curator Dale Pollock.

Aurora’s Sunrise

BASED ON THE TRUE STORY OF AURORA MARDIGANIAN

• In Armenian/English/Turkish/ Kurdish/German with English subtitles

• Armenia/Germany/Lithuania, unrated, directed by Inna Sahakyan, 2022, documentary/animation, 96 minutes

• At only 14 years old, Aurora lost everything during the horror of the Armenian genocide. Two years later, through luck and extraordinary courage, she escaped to New York, where her story became a media sensation. Starring as herself in Auction of Souls, an early Hollywood blockbuster, Aurora became the face of one of the largest charity campaigns in American history. With a blend of vivid animation, interviews with Aurora herself, and 18 minutes of surviving footage from her lost silent epic, Aurora’s Sunrise revives a forgotten story of survival.

Director’s Note — Inna Sahakyan

The Armenian genocide is the enduring pain of my nation. It is my family’s pain, and it is my own pain. Though I always wanted to, I was wary of making a film about it. I was afraid to be overly sentimental, overly emotional. I was afraid of telling stories that only confirmed Armenians as a nation of victims with no historical agency and nothing but tragedy running through our veins. That is, until I stumbled upon an interview with Aurora Mardiganian while going through archival interviews with Armenian Genocide survivors at the Zoryan Institute.

I was mesmerized the first time I watched it. While painful to hear, the elderly woman appeared to grow more and more youthful as she spoke. Through her words and expressions, an incredible but ordinary heroism shone: this woman survived a genocide but refused to be a victim. She refused to be reduced to an object of history. This is the character I wanted to build in Aurora’s Sunrise, resilient, powerful and heartwarming all at once.

My mission was to create a film taking audiences beyond the cold facts of the genocide, so I decided on a dynamic combination of mediums: animation, archival interviews with Aurora Mardiganian, and digitally-restored footage from Aurora’s 1919 film Auction of Souls. The majority of the film’s runtime is animation. Animation is a very powerful medium for portraying something as difficult as trauma. It explicitly portrays the representation of an event and not the event itself, bridges this distance, and allows for the viewer to be deeply engaged with the narrative and thematic core of the story. At the same time, animation is a medium that can communicate not only the colors of the story, but even its smells, tastes, and textures. It becomes the soul of the film, and lets Aurora’s now forgotten story become vivid again. It goes further than reproducing the events: it interprets them, like our brain does with memories, and allows symbols and motifs to speak loudly instead of drowning them in the utter realism of hundreds of details.

Of course, the danger of animation is that it may produce a sense of unreality — and this is why it is so crucial that the film also features archival footage of the real Aurora and that of her film: to let the woman and her work speak for itself and to remind the audience that all this really did happen.

Above all, I believe this film is important because in Aurora Mardiganian’s story we see a brave young Armenian woman who, despite enduring genocide, hunger, slavery, and exploitation, refused to be a victim. She refused to be swept away by the tides of history. It’s a timeless story of the resilience of the human spirit, the power of hope, and the importance of never giving up. In our evermore uncertain world, this kind of story should be told.