Tigran Arakelyan

The story of how Aurora Mardiganian (1901-94), a survivor of the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire (1915-17), became a Hollywood silent film star.

Young, full of energy and not deprived of acting talent, Aram is busy every single day with his own business - the execution of court decisions, mainly related to unpaid bank loans. In simple terms, he takes from unfortunate people what they could not pay. He is quite content with his career-driven life.

Zako - was the name German soldiers gave to the Soviet Armenian painter, Sargis Mangasaryan. Thanks to his creative gifts, Zako prevailed and survived the hell of WWII military camps.Zako endured by drawing portraits of his tormentors. He tried to escape several times, but each time landed in another harsher camp. After the war, he risked exile to Siberia, as he was a prisoner of war, he was considered a traitor to the Soviet Union. He created several huge portraits of Stalin to earn him passage home to Soviet Armenia.Some years later, in 1956, Zako visits the famous Picasso exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow with his friends. He realized how undeveloped his portrait drawings had remained all those years. Although he was fighting for his physical freedom throughout, his artistic evolution was stunted within the system.

A daughter gives voice to the aching physical and psychological toll experienced by two hotel cleaners who work in silence, track time and wear exhaustion in ways that are rarely seen or heard. Their bodies communicate the conditions of their labour, reflecting the rhythm, precision, strength and beauty of everyone who must work to survive. - Angie Driscoll