AURORA’S SUNRISE

Director Inna Sahakyan

Production year 2022

Length 96min.

Country Armenia/Germany/Lithuania

SYNOPSIS

Aurora's Sunrise tells the true story of a teenage refugee turned Hollywood star. At only 14 years old, Aurora lost everything during the horror of the Armenian Genocide. But with luck and extraordinary courage she escaped to New York, where her story became a media sensation. Starring in a Hollywood blockbuster as herself, Aurora would become the face of the largest charity campaign in American history. With a blend of vivid animation, video testimony, and rediscovered footage from her original silent epic, Aurora's Sunrise revives Aurora Mardiganian’s inspiring forgotten story.
This film was made possible with the academic contribution of the Zoryan Institute and is based on its Oral History Archive․

CAST & CREW

Inna Sahakyan

Director

Producer(s)

Vardan Hovhannisyan, Christian Beetz, Justė Michailinaitė, Kęstutis Drazdauskas, Eric Esrailian, Inna Sahakyan

Script

Inna Sahakyan, Kerstin Meyer-Beetz, Peter Liakhov

Director of Photography

Vardan Brutyan

Music by

Christine Aufderhaar,Additional music: Andranik Berberyan, Garegin Arakelyan

Edit

Ruben Ghazaryan

Cast

Anzhelika Hakobyan, Arpi Petrossian

Production company(ies)

Bars Media, Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion, Artbox Laisvalaikio Klubas

Inna Sahakyan

Inna Sahakyan is a film director and producer from Armenia. Inna graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts. Since 2003 she has been working as a producer and director at Bars Media Documentary Film Studio. As assistant director, she collaborated on the multi-award winning documentary A Story of People in War and Peace. In 2022, she completed the feature-length animated narrative documentary Aurora's Sunrise, a monumental seven-year project made in co-production with Germany & Lithuania with Eurimages support, which premiered at Annecy IFF and will be broadcasted on Arte in 2023. Her award-winning documentaries include the Armenian-Dutch coproduction Mel, and the Armenian-American-Japanese-Finnish coproduction The Last Tightrope Dancer in Armenia (Co-dir.: Arman Yeritsyan), which was broadcasted on PBS (US), NHK (Japan), YLE (Finland) and other international channels.