"Aurora's Sunrise"

About the film, “Aurora’s Sunrise”

“Aurora’s Sunrise is a beautifully made film which captures the spirit and extraordinary scale of an unimaginable journey. This is a very powerful story of horror, survival and a most moving act of sharing.” - Atom Egoyan

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
By 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 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.

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 … 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.

SOME HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Aurora was a teenager when she lost her family to the first genocide of the twentieth century, a nightmare that she herself barely survived. But when asked to not just remember but relive this experience all over again, she said “yes”.

In 1915, as WWI raged on, the Ottoman Empire singled out its entire Armenian population for destruction. Only 14 years old at the time, Aurora’s story was tragically relatable.

Forced onto a death march towards the Syrian desert, she lost her entire family before being kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. But through multiple miraculous twists of fate, Aurora was able to use her wits and courage to escape her captors, and find her way to the shores of the United States. Young, beautiful, and with an extraordinary story to tell — the papers quickly found Aurora, and within a year her story was on every newsstand from coast to coast.

It didn’t take long for Hollywood to take notice. With little regard for the toll it would take on the traumatized teenager, they convinced her 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.

In the late 1920s, expanding US-Turkish relations caused any mention of the Genocide to fade away. All copies of “Auction of Souls” were believed to be lost. Only in 1994, several months after Aurora’s death, fragments of Auction of Souls were rediscovered.

Utilizing a dynamic blend of different mediums, including archival interviews with Aurora herself, as well the restored surviving footage of Aurora’s silent-era film. “Aurora’s Sunrise” brings this incredible story to life for a new generation — the story of how one girl relived her life’s greatest pain to save her people.

About the Director

Inna Sahakyan has directed and produced feature-length documentaries, documentary series, and shorts, for over fifteen years. Following her feature-length debut co-directing the award-winning Armenia’s “Last Tightrope Dancer” in 2010, she directed “Aurora’s Sunrise,” completing international productions in 2022. She also enjoys mentoring her native Armenia’s next generation of filmmakers.