Armenia’s ’s Oscar© 2023 Entry for Best International Feature: ‘Aurora’s Sunrise’ directed by Inna Sahakyan
Based on the true story of Aurora Mardiganian
‘Aurora’s Sunrise’ is a surprising film on many levels. It is an historical artifact on its own. A story within a story, both of which are highly relevent today, the film ought to make it to the Oscar shortlist if not all the way to the nomination, where competition is very strong this year.
Most remarkable are the closing words of the protagonist, Aurora Mardiganian who was in her 90s when the interview with her was recorded. She was 14 at the time of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Aurora passed away in 1994. The Genocide seems so long ago and yet is vividly alive as a festering wound today.
Aurora Mardiganian states with utter conviction that if the world had stood up to the Turks and acted to condemn and end the Armenian Genocide, then Hitler (who himself said, « who will ever remember the Armenians ? » would not have been so bold as to perpetuate the genocide against the Jews. Some might say, as they do about stories of the Holocaust, « enough already » but as we see the same story repeated around the world today, in Russian aggression against Ukraine, Chinese against Uighers, Hindus of India against Muslims, Israel against Palestine, Darfur : there cannot be enough reminding the world of atrocities which need to be addressed and taken responsibility for if anyone truly wants to redeem humankind’s humanity. Without admitting and facing the past misdeeds, we cannot progress and are doomed to repetition until we bring on our own end.
If we do not say no to Russia or to China or ; if we do not acknowledge our own nation’s indigenous genocide and massive kidnapping of Africans, we are endangering our own selves to future genocides and we will never get out of the mess we are finding ourselves in today which includes mass shootings and fentanyl poisoning which is killing our young adult population.
In 1915, as WWI raged, the Ottoman Empire singled out its entire Armenian population for extermination. Only 14 years old at the time, Aurora lost everything during the horror and was forced onto a death march towards the Syrian desert. She lost her entire family before being sold into sexual slavery, from which she escaped. Two years later, through luck and extraordinary courage, she reached New York, where her story became a media sensation.
View the trailer HERE
With little regard for the toll it would take on the traumatized teenager, one of the founding fathers of Hollywood, producer William Selig convinced Aurora that by bringing her story to the silver screen she would be able to help other survivors of the genocide.
And so Aurora relived the unbearable, and became the most improbable starlet of the silent era in Auction of Souls, a runaway success, breaking box office and fundraising campaign records. After the film’s release, one out of every three American families reportedly contributed to the campaign to help the victims of the genocide. With the help of the film, a campaign by the aid group Near East Relief raised $116 million and saved the lives of over 132,000 orphaned survivors. The number of their descendants are in the millions.
During his time as Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau witnessed first-hand the atrocities committed against Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians at the hands of the Ottoman government. However, expanding Turkish lobbying in Congress thwarted President Wilson’s aim to aid Armenia. Congress’s action caused any mention of the Genocide to cease. All copies of Auction of Souls throughout the world were believed to be lost. The diappearance of all the prints may be in part because they were fragile, made of nitrate, but there is also conjecture that their disappearnce could be due to a concerted effort initiated by the Turkish government to destroy them. However, in 1994, several months after Aurora’s death, 18 minutes, fragments of Auction of Souls were rediscovered.
The story of this feature film compelled me to interview the film’s director Inna Sahakyan.
To begin, I am curious to know if you are living in Armenia today ?
Currently, for the Award campaign, I am deviding my time between Armenia and Los Angeles.
Was this filmed here or there?
It was filmed in Armenia. I am part of a small production company and we create the material we work on. We internationally co-produced several award winning feature documentaries in the past, and when I found the idea for this film while researching the Genocide, it became a much larger story.
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.
The archival video interviews with Aurora, filmed by the Zoryan Institute with two additional interviews from the Armenian Film Foundation, comprise a major medium of Aurora’s Sunrise. The majority of the film’s narration was built from the stories she told in these interviews.
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.
What have you done before this ?
I have directed and produced feature-length documentaries, documentary series, and shorts, for over fifteen years. Following my feature-length debut co-directing the award-winning Armenia’s Last Tightrope Dancer in 2010, I directed Mel and Aurora’s Sunrise, and completed both international co-productions in 2022.
For this larger film I have to credit the great team I worked with the editor and live action scenes director Ruben Ghazaryan, art director Tigran Arakelyan among others.
Aurora’s Sunrise is the first-ever animated feature created by Bars Media, and the first-ever animated documentary film made in Armenia — and making the film was no simple task.
I had never worked with a fiction script or animation so there was a lot new for me.
On the writing too I needed help because I did not want it to be overly emotional or overly subjective. I needed a critical eye and for that I am so grarteful to my cowriter Kerstin Meyer-Beetz who is part of the German team who coproduced it, the Beetz Brothers, and to the cowriter Peter Liakhov.
How did it develop into an Armenian-German-Lithuanian coproduction ?
It is very difficult for Armenia, a very small country with a very small national support system, to raise money for production. But it was very important that we have the support of National Cinema Center of Armenia to legitimize our efforts to raise co-production funds. Each country brings its own money and funds and its own artistic structure. Gebruder Beetz in Germany had not worked with us previously, but we are from the same documentary « tribe », and the film’s producer knew them from Documentary Campus Masterschool so they decided to work together. ZDF came on board. I mentioned the imporance of cowriting with Kerstin Meyer-Beetz.
The music component with original music by the celebrated Christine Aufderhaar (also from Germany) with additional Armenian music from Andranik Berberyan and Garegin Arakelyan, was the sinew that connected the film into a moving and elegant whole.
Lithuania came in later with producers Justė Michailinaitė and Kestutis Drazdauskas and animation producer Meinardas Valkevicius, the key animator Sarunas Vystartas, Gediminas Skyrius the lead illustrator and storyboard designer, Rimas Valeikis the lead character designer and we had great team of Lithuanian illustrators working with them. The international partnership with Lithuania was crucial. With the Armenian team taking a lead in art direction, cooperation with the Lithuanian team helped create something both new but also deeply Armenian.The artistic style of animation came out of the Lithuanian and Armenian artists working together on linear solutions, color, etc trying to find a unique art style which eveolved.
Eurimages came in as well and it was the first time that Armenia was the majority producer with this pan-European funding body. And important to note that this was by a unanimous support of all its voting members.
Every character had documentary material behnd them. The archival research came from fundraising and small grants, awards and lots of ptiching workhshops. Each producing country has its own distribution there set up, Gegruder Beetz will distribute in Germany. International sales are by Cat and Docs. In Armenia, it was first released in the Golden Apricot Film Festival, the baiggest festival in the area where it won the Silver apricot, the second prize in the Internatioal Compeititon and it was released in cinemas from November 3. It was supposed to be for two weeks, but it is so popular than its run has been extending and it is stilll playing in one of the theaters.
Did Waltz with Bashir influence your use of animation ?
Absolutely. It was the first animated documentary I saw, but then I followed all of them.
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 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.
How long did it take you to make this film ?
The overall production was about seven years out of which about three yearswere spent in the development/script stage.
Five years into the making of Aurora’s Sunrise production of the film hit a major obstacle. In September 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing — which had already put production, especially animation into a precarious position — a new conflict erupted over the landlocked region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which has been disputed territory between Armenia and Azerbaijan since the collapse of the USSR.
For Armenia, over forty-four days of fighting, it was nothing less than a state of total war. By the time a ceasefire was signed on 10 November 2020, Armenia, a tiny country of only 3 million, had lost more soldiers per capita than the United States did in WWII.
During the fighting, all of the men on Bars Media’s staff were on the front lines, some under direct fire. The strain of the war put the entire project in jeopardy, and the studio itself nearly shut down. But thanks to the perseverance of the German and Lithuanian co-producers the project kept moving forward.
Are you happy with the result ?
I am very content. I would still make changes. One could always do more but one must decide at some point to stop, Overall I am satisfield — we did tremendous work.
With a blend of vivid animation, interviews with Aurora herself, and 18 minutes of surviving footage from the lost silent epic, Aurora’s Sunrise revives a forgotten story of survival.
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.
Screenplay by Inna Sahakyan, Kerstin Meyer-Beetz, Peter Liakhov
Produced by Vardan Hovhannisyan, Christian Beetz, Justė Michailinaitė, Kęstutis Drazdauskas, Eric Esrailian (Bars Media, Artbox Laisvalaikio Klubas, Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion)
The Zoryan Institute, non-profit and charity provided a crucial level of research and financial support in the making of this production and this film is based on its Oral History Archive.
Featuring Aurora (Arshaluys) Mardiganian as herself (archival documentary footage), Anzhelika Hakobyan as Aurora, Arpi Petrossian as the voice of Aurora (animation)
Art Director: Tigran Arakelyan
Editor & Live Action Director: Ruben Ghazaryan
Original Music: Christine Aufderhaar, Additional Music: Andranik Berberyan, Garegin Arakelyan
Lead Illustrator: Gediminas Skyrius
Armenian with English subtitles
Run Time: 96 minutes
* Best Baltic co-production film at Tallinn’s Black Nights Flim Festival 2022
*Asia Pacific Screen Award Winner — Best Animated Film 2022
*Animation is Film- Audience Award Winner 2022
*World Premiere, Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2022, in competition
*Winner Silver Apricot- Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival 2022
* Official Selection- Fantoche International Animation Film Festival 2022,
*Official Selection- Doclisboa 2022, From the Earth to the Moon section
*Official Selection- Film Fest Hamburg 2022, Kaleidoskop section, in competition
*North American Premiere, Animation is Film Festival 2022, in competition
*Official Selection- Asian World Film 2022, in competition
*Official Selection- IDFA 2022, Best of Fests
*Official Selection — Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2022, in Baltic competition
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