Screening at IDFA in the Best of Fests section, Armenian director Inna Sahakyan’s Aurora’s Sunrise is intended to guard against the erasure of history. It recreates the remarkable life of Armenian genocide survivor and sometime Hollywood actress Arshaluys Mardigian (later known by her American stage-name of Aurora Mardiganian) through a blend of animation, archival interviews with an elderly but sprightly Aurora (who died in 1994 in Los Angeles), and excerpts of rediscovered black-and-white fragments of the 1919 silent film she starred in, Auction of Souls, which was based on her own experiences in Armenia, and was for some time considered lost. The United States only recognised the Armenian genocide in 2021, joining the 33 other nations to have done so, while Turkey still denies it. This fact, set out in an end-title, lends additional gravity to Aurora’s testimony of atrocities, and the importance of the film as a vehicle to circulate awareness. An ambitious project with glossy, high production values, it is Armenia’s official Oscar entry. The biographical tale is told chronologically and rather conventionally through animation with a naturalistic palate that is intricately drawn but hardly innovative, making this bleak chapter of history as accessible as possible, while not shying away from depicting the reality of the genocide’s more graphic horrors.
Arshaluys is fourteen years old in 1915, as World War I rages. Events are narrated from her point of view (voiced in Armenian by Arpi Petrossian). After her father, a prosperous silk manufacturer, and one of her brothers are taken by Ottoman soldiers from their hometown of Chmshkadzag, the remainder of the family are displaced, forced into a death march for weeks to the Euphrates, which was by then full of corpses. The harrowing succession of atrocities Aurora experiences first-hand is carefully, matter-of-factly set out, in a tone favouring accuracy over excessive sentiment, from seeing most of her remaining relatives shot in front of her, to being kidnapped by Kurdish bandits for sale into sex slavery, and escaping into the mountains where she encounters members of the Fedayi (Armenian freedom fighters.) Making it to Erzarum, which by then was in the hands of the Imperial Russian Army, she gains passage by ship to America via Tbilisi and Saint Petersburg (then in the throes of revolution), with the help of a national liberation leader who exhorts her to tell the world what is happening to her people. In this sense, the film shows fidelity to that promise.
A strong-willed and resilient teenager, the picture painted of the young Arshaluys Mardigian in its animated segments is highly compelling, an impression further borne out by the composed, good-humoured figure interviewed in the interspersed archival footage (sourced from the Oral History Archive of genocide-awareness organisation the Zoryan Institute.) Still, the dimension of sexual terrorisation which was part of the genocide push remains very present as memory for Aurora after she reaches the United States, underscoring this trauma’s deep, ongoing legacy.
The sequence of events that led to Arshaluys becoming, for a short time, a Hollywood star, is to the film’s credit, presented ambivalently. Her success is celebrated, but not without strong critique of her exploitation at the hands of an unscrupulous movie industry of male power-brokers eager to leverage her story for their own ends. The solitary refugee, still only sixteen by the time she reaches American shores, hopes to find an older brother who had immigrated before the family’s disintegration. But, after becoming a celebrity poster-child for the charity New East Relief and its drive to raise millions of dollars to aid Armenian refugees, she instead ends up under the wing of an opportunistic star manufacturer. Arshaluys (whose name has by now been anglicised to Aurora, and her surname made more pronounceable for an American public) is shunted around on a year-long promotional tour for her movie Auction of Souls, which takes a toll. She suffers acute exhaustion from reliving her trauma over and over, telling her tale on the public stage. Like a forerunner of Britney Spears, in an industry inclined to utilise women as performing puppets, she is angrily chastised by her legal guardian (the man who wrote down her story, and packaged it as a screenplay, Henry Gates) for her ill health, packed off to a nunnery, and replaced, unbeknownst to her, by a series of impersonators — a measure to keep the public hooked. As much as it is a testament to the extraordinary fortitude of Arshaluys Mardigian, as it bears witness to the sufferings of her people, the film is also a take on early Hollywood stardom from a MeToo-era perspective, which should resonate further with audiences in light of the current industry reckoning.
Director: Inna Sahakyan
Screenwriters: Peter Liakhov, Kerstin Meeyer-Beetz, Inna Sahakyan
Cinematographer: Vardan Brutyan
Editing: Ruben Ghazaryan
Cast: Anzhelika Hakobyan, Arpi Petrossian (voice)
Producers: Vardan Hovhannisyan, Christian Beetz, Kestutis Drazdauskas, Eric Esrailian, Juste Michailinaite
Animation Studios: Meinart Animation Studios, OnOff Studio
Lead Illustrator: Gediminas Skyrius
Art Director: Tigran Arakelyan
Composer: Christine Aufderhaar
Production companies: Bars Media (Armenia), Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion (Germany), Artbox laisvalaikio klubas (Lithuania)
Sales: CAT&Docs
Venue: IDFA (Best of Fests)
In Armenian, English, Turkish, Kurdish, and German
96 minutes
