‘Aurora’s Sunrise’ Review: A Patchwork Record of the Armenian Genocide

The documentary “Aurora’s Sunrise” shares the nice and horrible story of Aurora Mardiganian, an Armenian survivor of the genocide that started in 1915. Aurora was 14 years previous and dwelling in a small city within the Ottoman Empire when the violence began. Her peaceable life was obliterated when her father and brother had been rounded up and murdered by Ottoman Turk troopers. Aurora was then pressured right into a dying march throughout the desert of what’s now Syria. She survived weeks of the march and two years of subsequent violence. Aurora witnessed unimaginable atrocities: rivers teeming with corpses, kids begging for his or her lives, bandits pillaging the caravans of survivors.

Aurora escaped these horrors by way of assistance from Armenian resistance teams. Her survival already made her a rarity, however Aurora’s most inconceivable achievement was that she was in a position to create a up to date document of her personal reminiscences. This movie follows Aurora’s story after she resettled in America and starred within the 1919 silent movie, “Auction of Souls,” which dramatized the occasions of her personal life. She by no means stopped sharing her reminiscences, together with in interviews that had been filmed a long time later.

Using lots of the supplies Aurora left behind, the documentary’s director, Inna Sahakyan, crafts a cohesive narrative of the girl’s life. Clips from “Auction of Souls” and pictures from Aurora’s later interviews assist animated re-enactments of her recorded reminiscences. Despite the presence of fabric that’s greater than 100 years previous, the elements utilizing cutouts and rotoscoping (redolent of the 2008 struggle docudrama “Waltz With Bashir) are what really feel probably the most dated. But even with that herky-jerky animation, the impact of Sahakyan’s compilation remains to be admirably seamless, and he or she creates a reconstructed, but nonetheless private document of a long-unrecognized genocide. The movie’s coherence is a mirrored image of each the ability of the filmmaker, and the heroic efforts of Aurora herself to make sure that her view of historical past wouldn’t be forgotten.

Aurora’s Sunrise
Not rated. In Armenian, Turkish, English, German and Kurdish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters.