A survivor of the 1915 Armenian genocide, the story of Aurora Mardiganin is the harrowing true story of a teenager who, after seeing her family murdered, embarked on a remarkable journey that involved incarceration within a Turkish harem and escape to the US. Her story was eventually re-told in a silent Hollywood film. That she re-lived that story as star of the film makes it all the more chilling.
Inna Sahakyan’s film is a very watchable hybrid documentary that blends archival interviews with Aurora with fragments of footage from the 1919 silent film Auction of Souls, also deploying elegantly drawn animation which essentially follows the life of Aurora throughout the most dramatic periods of her life. The film is largely based on Aurora’s autobiography and an oral history recorded by the Zoryan Institute.
Aurora’s Sunrise is the first animated film from documentary director Sahakyan – whose previous work includes The Last Tightrope Dancer In Armenia (2010) and Mel (2022) – and while the photo-style animation is never ground-breaking its beauty acts as a counterbalance to the horrors that are revealed. Structurally the film is straightforward in telling Aurora’s story chronologically (which means it gets a little repetitive at times) but the sheer scale of her real-life story makes the whole experience both dramatic and heartrending.
The film opens with archive footage of the elderly Aurora unrolling a tattered poster from the original film as her cat watches on, and points out herself on the poster. The documentary cuts to animation of the film’s 1919 New York premiere, as she says: “I became a Hollywood star when I was just 17,” adding, “but I wasn’t an actress. I was not acting. I was…reliving.”
The animated story opens with her playing with her sister Arusyak against the seemingly idyllic backdrop of her home town of Chmshkadzag, Western Armenia, in Spring 1951. She loves life with her well-to-do family, before her father is warmed by their shepherd that, “the war is getting closer. I hear It’s becoming dangerous for Armenians now.” He urges the family to hide in the mountains, but her father refuses.
We hear how the soldiers came for her father and brother and killed them, and then the women and children were taken out of town and marched away for weeks, some dying by the side of road, the children thrown into a river by guards. Women are raped and then sold, with Aurora recounting how she escaped and was recaptured several times before being sold into the harem of a wealthy Turkish governor.
She manages to escape again and with the aid of an uncle – an American-based businessman – makes her way to the US, in search of her remaining older brother. Her story was picked up by newspapermen who relished the account of a “beautiful refugee searching for her brother.” Journalist Henry Gates wrote her story with her, and also became her legalguardian. He insisted, though, that she change her first name. Her name was Arshaluys, which meant “morning light” in English, and so they changed it to Aurora.
Hollywood soon came calling and she is convinced to play herself, but after the film was released she was roped into tours to promote the film, before being sent to a convent to recover from the stress of reliving her trauma…though it turned out impersonators were hired to “play her” in the continuing promotional tours.
After the film’s release, though, 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
Armenia-Germany-Lithuania, 2022, 96mins
Dir: Inna Sahakyan
Production: Bars Media, Artbox Laisvalaikio, Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion
International sales: CAT&Docs
Producers: Vardan Hovhannisyan Christian Beetz, Justė Michailinaitė, Kęstutis Drazdauska,s Eric Esrailian
Scr: Inna Sahakyan, Kerstin Meyer-Beetz, Peter Liakhov
Editor: Ruben Ghazaryan
Music: Christine Aufderhaar
