Review of Aurora’s Sunrise (Արշալույսի լուսաբացը)

When the film The Cut was released in 2015, the epic production directed by Fatih Akin (of Turkish descent) and starring Tahar Rahim (of Algerian origins), I remember taking advantage of the review I wrote about it to tell a personal anecdote related to the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Turks, formerly known as the Ottoman Empire. From that attempt at conversation, and from the fact that no Turkish actors appeared throughout the 138 minutes of footage of The Cut, I was able to draw the same conclusion: Turks do not like to talk about it. A topic, that of genocide, which is, on the other hand, the second most studied after the Holocaust, and which took place some years before, between 1915 and 1923. Was it the lack of international condemnation of what happened that gave wings to other horrors that other countries carried out?

In Aurora’s Sunrise, protagonist Aurora Mardiganian seems to answer that it was. There was never reparation for the victims, nor trial for the guilty. However, efforts were made, even if they were personal or through associations, to do at least a little justice. That’s what Inna Sahakyan is talking to us about, the director behind this documentary that mixes animated recreations of the protagonist’s life with interviews from when Aurora was already an old woman, along with scenes from the film Auction of Souls, in which she starred and which was believed to have been lost until her death (when they found 18 minutes of the more than 90 that are believed to have lasted). And here is that great effort, because Auction of Souls (now known as Ravished Armenia), is actually the title of a book based on her life and the film in which she starred in 1919. The story of the documentary, which links to that of Auction of Souls, reflects on what was experienced, on what was told and on what was acted in relation to these experiences, from when the Turks held her until she escaped from the death marches, leaving hardly any detail in between, with the intention of so that people around the world (although especially in the United States) would know what had just happened in her homeland. That is to say, practically 100 years after that film, we witness one that, in addition to recovering what happened so that it is not forgotten, recovers the figure of a woman who suffered and suffered with hardly any reward in return.

Reminding Waltz with Bashir, by Ari Folman, for its peculiar way of telling a true story as an animated story with a documentary feel, Aurora’s Sunrise takes the experiences of a young woman who lost all the members of her family in the Armenian genocide to also reflect on the treatment of refugees, in this case through the way Aurora was exploited in the United States or by the Kurds, without regard for her mental health, even after all the horror she endured, even if it was to help many other refugees. The atrocities she went through, the repeated times she had to relive them, the inhumanity of so many men, and also Aurora’s determination to continue making known through her public image the suffering that her entire people experienced in trying to find a solution, little justice, are reflected in this documentary.

Perhaps for this reason, seeing that until 2021 the United States still did not recognize the genocide as such, the value of this documentary lies in how it is able to preserve the memory of all the victims, who were treated with completely extreme hatred (which included vaginal impaling of women who could not be sold or were not interested in raping), showing the number of atrocities that the Armenians suffered. The Armenian genocide claimed the lives of 2 million people, and yet the only reason I knew about it, to put it personally, is because in high school I had an Armenian friend who told me about it as much as she talked about the diaspora derived from that (from which people like Charles Aznavour emerge). That doesn’t mean that others don’t know it exists, but it gives me the impression that in this case my case can be extrapolated or generalized. Thus, Aurora’s Sunrise does not shy away from the horrific reality of the suffering and trauma experienced by the entire Armenian nation (also by other Christian ethnic groups such as Assyrians and Pontic Greeks), understanding that sometimes there is no possibility of reconciliation, at least not while the perpetrators consistently deny wrongdoing.