Aurora's Sunrise (2023) Plot Summary

The film is primarily animated, intercut with the remaining footage of Auction of Souls, an interview with Mardiganian, and other historical footage.

Arshaluys Mardiganian is born into a wealthy Armenian family in Eastern Anatolia in the Ottoman Empire. Their neighbor, a Kurdish shepherd, warns them of Armenians rounded up and killed by the Ottomans, but her father refuses to leave, but then he and her brother are drafted to fight in World War I. Soon after, her family, along with thousands of other Armenians, are forced onto a death march across the Syrian desert, in which her mother and siblings all perish. Mardiganian is sold into sexual slavery, but she flees by diving into a river. She witnesses the family of her two-year-old cousin killed, and she escapes with the baby and they are taken in by a kind Kurdish family. She leaves the baby with the family, believing that he will be safer with them. She finds shelter at a monastery, which is then attacked, and she is captured and sold into a Turkish harem. She flees back home to Armenia and finds her neighbor, the shepherd, who informs her that her uncle is alive, but very ill with malaria, and is hiding in a village in the mountains. Once he recovers, he joins the resistance and leaves Mardiganian in Russian-controlled Erzurum.

With the help of American missionaries, she leaves Armenia for Tbilisi, then St. Petersburg, and then to New York in the United States. Armenian military leader Andranik Ozanian gives her the mission of informing the United States of what is happening to her people; she also hopes to find her brother who lives in the States. She is taken in by journalist Henry Leyford Gates and his novelist wife Eleanor Brown Gates, who becomes her legal guardian. She writes and publishes an autobiography, entitled Ravished Armenia, under the Anglicized name of “Aurora.” The book gains the attention of a director who wants to turn it into a film, with Arshaluys in the leading role. The film, Auction of Souls, is made and used to raise funds for American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief. She tours the country promoting the film, but repeatedly reliving the trauma of the genocide takes a toll on her well-being, and despite her efforts, she never finds her brother. At a screening in Buffalo, she collapses from exhaustion.

Gates sends her to live at a convent, until she receives a letter from her uncle revealing that her sister Arusyak was found alive in Aleppo, and has arranged to come to the United States. She finds new hope upon learning this, along with seeing the amount of Armenian orphans rescued by the Far East Relief. A ship arrives at the harbor, where Mardiganian awaits her sister.

Text details that Mardiganian later became a wife and mother, and lived in obscurity until her death in 1994. Shortly after, the remaining footage of the once fully lost Auction of Souls was discovered. The Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity is named in honor of her. Since then, the United States has acknowledged the Armenian genocide while the government of Turkey continues to deny it. The film ends with a dedication to all genocide survivors, and a message to “never forget.”