Tell us a bit about yourself - all the basics! Where you’re from, where you grew up, interests, hobbies, siblings, causes you’re passionate about, anything else that comes to mind…

I was born just two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, in a small village in Armenia. After the collapse, all that remained was a dark green Soviet birth certificate, no electricity, my parents’ endless fights and conversations about lack of money, unemployment, and men passing time in the center of our village doing nothing but playing chess. As my mom often said, it was a generation haunted by "broken dreams." I grew up spending the long winter evenings listening to my dad's stories, illuminated only by candlelight and the sparks from the wooden stove. Me, my brother and my uncle’s kids would crowd around him as he told the story of hunter Avo. My imagination came alive from those stories. We didn't have a TV or any other kind of entertainment. Sometimes when he was not in the mood, my dad would say that hunter Avo was sick and there was no story that day. That was the saddest sentence I could hear as a child. “Hunter Avo is sick.” Similarly, my mom had an endless love for the arts that she tried to transmit to us in any way that our poor life conditions could allow at the time. She would take us to Yerevan in her old, white Zaporozhets car to attend exhibitions or plays. In my childhood it was all handmade toys or just stories, stories, and words. Then I grew up and developed that same passion for telling stories. I wanted to tell you about myself but it turned out to be about my parents. What can I say? 🙂

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Be patient. Be patient with yourself and with others. Work, work, work. Be patient, follow your feelings, trust your feelings, read, read, read, don’t rush to get the answers to your question, learn how to live with having questions and also enjoy the process of learning. Not knowing is ok. Being lost is ok. Tolerate not knowing. It is all about learning.

If you could have coffee with any filmmaker, living or dead, who would it be and why?

There is an interview from 1969 during the 7th New York Film Festival, when Susan Sontag and Agnès Varda are discussing their films with American film critic Jack Kroll. I watched it and remember having this intense feeling that I wanted to be there. I wanted to be there and just sit and not even ask a question. That’s where my mind went when I read this question - directly to that interview. These two women greatly influenced my understanding of art and literature, so it was so thrilling to find out that my two favorite ****thinkers not only knew each other, they also had long in depth discussions about things together. When I became interested in photography and started taking my own photos, I read Susan Sontag’s book “On Photography.” For a long time after that, I couldn’t even take a single photo with my phone. She helped shape my perception of photography and the role of photography in contemporary life so drastically that I couldn’t just continue taking photos in the same way anymore. I’m not the same person before and after reading that book and getting to know her writings in general. And Agnes Varda is a filmmaker who helped me connect with myself, to be honest with what I feel and express it. The playfulness, the lightness and at the same time the creativity and depth she brought to film spoke to my personality and creative aesthetic. I had never watched a film like that before, it was like learning a new language of film that I didn’t know existed.