Written by Sona Karapoghosyan
There are many stories by and about Armenian Genocide survivors— all of them personal in their own way—passed down from one generation to the next. Alas, most of these stories remain untold, hidden away like wounds that are impossible to heal. The story of Aurora Mardiganian, a 14-year-old girl who survived the atrocities of 1915, managed to flee to New York and become what could be called a Hollywood starlet, is one of these incredible tales. However, unlike all other stories, hers was told on screens across the United States. It also became her curse.
Told in a subtle but powerful form of documentary animation, Aurora’s Sunrise, directed by Inna Sahakyan, is Armenia’s official submission to the 2023 Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category. The film depicts the terrible ordeal of a teenage girl during the Armenian Genocide and her time in Hollywood as the star of a silent film about her life.
The idea for Aurora’s Sunrise grew out of another project connected to the 100th anniversary of Armenian Genocide that the director was working for at Bars Media, an Armenia-based production company. “We were cooperating with the Zoryan Institute while doing research with survivors’ testimonies,” Sahakyan says. “The idea was to choose ten stories and to make a short film about each of them, at the end combining them into one feature, but when we came across Aurora’s story, it was clear that this material was destined for a separate, longer film. We decided to focus all of our energy on this story.” Zoryan Institute, a nonprofit organization and charity, provided a crucial level of research and financial support in the making of the production, and this film is based on its Oral History Archive.
The work on the film took almost seven years and went through a global pandemic, a war, and several other internal and external challenges. And although Aurora’s Sunrise is in many aspects a documentary, many parts of the production, including its script, were created much in the same way as a fiction film. The first three years of development consisted of thorough research and study of the available archival material, such as from the Library of Congress, where digitization of their newsletters from the 1910s and the 1920s that happened in parallel to the work on the film sometimes necessitated drastic changes in the script. Securing funding of such an ambitious project had its own challenges as well. In addition to support provided by the National Cinema Center of Armenia (NCCA), the filmmakers were able to secure funding by Eurimages, one of the biggest cultural support funds within the Council of Europe, thus becoming the first Armenian film to be supported by Eurimages in majority co-production. The film was ultimately co-produced with Germany and Lithuania.
Aurora’s Sunrise blends three different types of material: recorded interviews with Aurora towards the end of her life, original footage from the surviving 18 minutes of Auction of Souls (1919), the silent film she starred in about her life that were digitally remastered, and – for the largest section of the three parts of the film – animated scenes of her life in and escape from Western Armenia. The latter is used to recreate the memories of the character and metamorphoses throughout the film. “A great storyteller herself, Aurora served as the main inspiration for the style and the colors of the animation,” Sahakyan says. The warm and bright tones that inform her fairytale-like childhood slowly give way to monochromatic and bleak tones, when the horrors of Genocide begin, that cause Aurora to lose her family members one after the other. Vividly glamorous, although almost blindingly, is the part of the film that is set in Hollywood, where Aurora participated in the making of Auction of Souls, which had its own unfortunate trajectory. The film in its entirety is now lost.
Believed to be the only surviving part of the film, that is sometimes also referred to as Ravished Armenia, the reels with these 18 minutes of material were shipped from Marseille, France by Armenian cinematographer Ervand Setian, and it was Argentinian scholar Eduardo Kozanlian who recognized that this was footage from Auction of Souls.
The team of animators behind the production of Aurora’s Sunrise mostly consisted of Lithuanian illustrators and artists, led by an art department from Armenia. The animation work was done with team members working remotely because of the pandemic. “Since there were so many people involved, it was very difficult to maintain the same artistic style in all illustrations,” recalls the director. “When the work was completed, we had to go over all of it again together with the Armenian art department, to make sure that everything was artistically consistent. Basically, our work was doubled.”
Aurora’s Sunrise is finally out in the world, traveling across major film festivals. The film had its premiere at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France, the largest animation film festival in the world, and screened at the Golden Apricot Yerevan International Festival in Armenia. The film also screened at festivals such as the Hamburg Film Festival in Germany, Doclisboa in Portugal, and will be shown at the Animation Is Film Festival on October 23 and at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in November.
“The screenings are usually followed by long and interesting discussions, varying from personal questions to political debates,” Sahakyan says. “It was particularly interesting to discuss in Hamburg, considering the final words spoken in the film by Aurora, stating that the Holocaust would not have happened if the Armenian Genocide had been internationally recognized and sanctioned.”
Aurora Mardiganian’s journey and what she went through at such a young age is unimaginable. Director Inna Sahakyan manages to capture all the marvelous qualities of Aurora: her strength and positive outlook, as well as her belief in humanity despite everything she has experienced. Aurora even chose to be a part of the Hollywood reenactment of her unbearably morbid life story, reliving the tragedy many times over, all for the greater good of helping victims of genocide. The fundraising that ran in parallel to the screenings of Auction of Souls was successful and reportedly one out of three American families in the United States contributed to the campaign. It’s estimated that approximately $116 million were raised during this time period and the lives of over 132,000 orphaned survivors were saved. As seen in the film, Aurora never regretted this sacrifice of hers.
Dr. Eric Esrailian, who serves as one of the producers on the film, comments on Aurora’s dedication. “I have always been inspired by Aurora Mardiganian’s bravery and determination. The idea to combine her personal story, her testimony and historical background thanks to the Zoryan Institute, animation, and presenting it all to the world in such a creative way is such a unique approach to storytelling. Director Inna Sahakyan and producer Vardan Hovhannisyan had so many challenges and roadblocks along the way because of the pandemic, but they were determined to do justice to Aurora’s story. The film is not just about the Armenian Genocide. It is about the incredible legacy of Aurora and has lessons for all of us today.”
