Writers: Inna Sahakyan, Kerstin Meyer-Beetz and Peter Liakhov
Director: Inna Sahakyan
Being screened as part of the Raindance Festival, Aurora’s Sunrise is a stunning film with a vitally important story to tell. It’s a documentary biopic presenting the true account of a young Armenian girl, Arshaluys (anglicised to Aurora) Mardiganian, born at the start of the twentieth century, who witnessed the atrocities of the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottomans in 1915-16. She survived against the odds (most men were slaughtered; most women were subject of sexual enslavement and brutality) and managed to escape to the United States. Here the press serialises her extraordinary account. Hollywood of the silent era turns it into a movie, Auction of Souls (1919), in which she plays herself.
The film was thought to have disappeared, but shortly after Aurora’s death in 1994, fragments of footage were discovered. These are used to powerful effect in the film, as is footage of Aurora being interviewed in old age, being interviewed. Beyond that, her epic tale is told in beautiful animation. Tigran Araqelyan as artistic director and lead animator, Gediminas Skyrius have created something utterly compelling. The film starts in Aurora’s hometown where her family lead a life of contentment. We see Aurora and her siblings putting on a play for her parents in a gorgeously drawn scene to which the film returns, to show all that has been lost.
The family’s Kurdish shepherd tells that since Armenians are being driven out of Constantinople by the Turks, warning them that they too will surely be attacked. Aurora’s father and oldest brother, having been forced to enlist, subsequently disappear. Women, terrorized by brutal violence are forced into exile, carrying their small children on a death march across the Syrian desert. They’re promised a place of safety, but it’s an illusion: all that awaits them are concentration camps. Thousands die en route. When Aurora reaches the Euphrates, it’s found to be full of corpses.
It’s no wonder Aurora’s story becomes the stuff of Hollywood, so incredible is her journey. She is captured by bandits, sold as a slave and escapes from a harem only to be recaptured. One compassionate German soldier allows her to run away in the night. There is a period of relief when she is taken in by a Kurdish family, but when news comes that Russians have liberated her providence, she leaves to seek out the Armenian resistance. She finds a beloved uncle, a successful business man, with American citizenship and it is his descriptions of the United States that determines Aurora to get there.
New York at the start of the 20s is shown in all its alluring glossiness. Aurora receives kind treatment, especially from one wealthy woman. But Aurora’s memoir, dictated to a powerful journalist, together with her beauty, makes her vulnerable. The Hollywood machine snaps her up. She agrees to take part in an extensive publicity tour on the promise that this will raise funds for the campaign for Near East relief. President Wilson himself proposes an American mandate for Armenia, to protect the nation. But the senate refuse to endorse it. Aurora meanwhile is shown increasingly exhausted. Endlessly having to repeat her bitter story revives the trauma and she collapses. She realises the fully extent of Hollywood’s exploitation when she is shut up in a convent, and discovers her producer has hired actresses to impersonate her on the lucrative tour.
The story as retold now could so easily be over-sensationalised. But the film’s stately, thoughtful pace allows us to see the psychological impact of the Armenian genocide, the existence of which to this day is disputed. And it’s the exquisite animation in particular that allows this to happen. Human faces which are otherwise simply drawn have extraordinarily expressive eyes. The worst of the atrocities are suggested, but never luridly depicted. Most horrific is an old fragment of Auction of Souls which suggests girls were crucified. It was worse than that, Aurora says. They were impaled on sharp stakes through the groin, hung up and left to die. The animators only need to show a few corpses, a few stakes jutting out of the sand, for us to understand the full horror.
Aurora’s Sunrise is nothing short of brilliant, its powerful message more relevant now than ever.
Aurora’s Sunrise is screening at the Raindance Film Festival 2023.
The Reviews Hub Score
Brilliant, compelling
