SYNOPSIS
Gyumri is the second biggest city in Armenia, and within 20 seconds the earthquake kills 25 000 people, sweeping away over twenty kilometers of land. I was born in this dead city that has stopped growing and has remained ever since under the dark shadow of the catastrophe, and in which every newborn child has in some way had to “replace” someone who died. Thirty years after, the post- cataclysmic generation of which I am part of, continuously asks itself the same question: to stay or to leave?
CAST & CREW
Sona Simonyan
Director
Producer(s)
Fanny Chrétien
Script
Sona Simonyan
Director of Photography
Nik Voigt
Music by
Bambir, Arrata
Sound
Nik Voigt
Edit
Julien Chardon
Production company(ies)
La Boîte à Songes TV78
Sona Simonyan
Born in Gyumri, Armenia. After graduating with a bachelor degree in journalism from Yerevan State Linguistic University after V. Brusov, she started her master’s degree at the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs (GIPA), the Department of Multimedia Journalism where she won the GIPA DocU Prize for Short Documentary. As soon as she was back to Armenia, she has been working as a video editor at Boon TV․ Great Expectations is her first full-length documentary though alongside working on the film, she has been working as a freelance documentary filmmaker for Chai-Khana NGO, creating 9 short documentaries during 4 years.
Filmography
Aleppo Files (2015), To Take a Step (2016), Changing Waves (2016), My Generation (2016), Cafe Nancy (2016), Life on the Road (2017), 3rd floor (2017), The Artist of Non-Art (2017), Uninhabited (2018), Great Expectations (2019).