A LUCKY MAN

A LUCKY MAN

Who hasn’t, at some point, dreamed about winning the lottery? Buying oneself a new car, paying one’s mortgage or retiring to live on an island? Luck has many faces, almost as many as dreams can be counted. And when it touches us, we see it as a form of happiness that will inevitably sweep us away and broaden our lives.

I think Armen, my cousin, must be feeling something similar after luck knocked on is door.

Up to the age of 37, he saw few changes in his life and suddenly fate winks at him and changes everything. A Green Card to work in the USA! Armen has always been a simple person, rather timid, yet today he proudly speaks up when asked at the US embassy what his guarantee is: “My hands,” he answers with all the recklessness that can only be attributed to innocence.

Precisely innocence, hope, fear, joy and the effort to bring to fruition a dream, are the mixed states of mind that are present in Armen's family since the start of the countdown that will take him far from his home in Armenia. They all attend a farewell party to celebrate these ambivalent feelings. It is not lost to anyone due to its raw reality; neither to pillars such as Madlen the grandmother, who at the end of her life watches with nostalgia as the country that she helped to found is dismembered hopelessly, nor to the father, who summarizes his pain at not having been able to teach the son who is now about to leave, something different, nor to the mother, Aunt Gina, who from the hope has made a spiritual and palliation statement attempting to alleviate us when she says that nothing can be worse than the situation now.

What we find in Armen’s and my family is a reflection of today’s Armenia, a country that by losing confidence in itself, has a notion, in one way or another, that the solution doesn’t lie in the immediate future, but in something that is beyond that. Which is precisely why the concept of luck plays an important role in everyday life. It functions as an engine generating a positive force, one that is capable of altering the static present.

This is something that is neither good nor bad, just a reality that is generated when one finds oneself at the doors of the unknown; when a situation is formed triggered off by a series of complexities after a sudden happening. Armen is a lucky man but that luck is not harmless, and on his way to the land of opportunity, both his family and his country will be undergoing a profound transformation.

This same transformation is what I face in this story, a tale that is created through special people to me at a special moment. There are many issues that assail me: What happens when luck comes and knocks at our door? What is this powerful energy that fills Armen’s heart and gives him the courage to undertake a journey so fraught with difficulties? How does one approach one's trust of luck when it robs one of a part of who one is? How can one keep believing in it? It's something strange and close to me. It penetrates deeply into the roots of who I am, and I want to come to understand it, so that I can tell the tale.

SHORT SINOPSIS

Armenia, a family and a goodbye-party, that serve as a metaphor for a country defined in a historical parenthesis - a country where the past is painful, the present uncertain and the future is trusted to the whims of chance - in this case, the GREEN CARD - international lottery that the U.S. government holds annually, offering the winners a chance to get a work permit and a permanent residency.

AS FOR ME

It's been 15 years since I left Armenia. I was only 13 years old and didn't really understand why we left, didn't understand what was happening, I remember this bubble of uncertainty, a strange combination of anxiety and happiness on the road we were undertaking. My uncle Samvel, Armen's father, told me: "Go, and don't come back, don't let your mother change her mind. Go and find soil where you can plant potatoes and then you call me, you already know that I plant the best potatoes". I was a little girl, and after arriving in Spain I soon forgot planting any potatoes… today my uncle reminds me this between laughs.

Now, the story is being repeated in my cousin, he won the Green Card Lottery, now I understand better the reasons for an emigration like that, but again I get an uncertainty, the worry mixed with enthusiasm. There are some who say the most beautiful moment of equilibrium is when it's about to be broken.

With all these feelings, all these questions, I've decided to grab my camera and go to Armenia to make a film about these ongoing moments of the emigration of my cousin, and to try to understand why everyone in my country is leaving.

AND YOU...

This is where you enter, those who now believe (if you've gotten this far, you're already a part of the project). Armenia is something remote, and it is a must that we go there. We search for sponsors who are able to provide money so that – along with our own investment– we'll be able to finish closing up the pre-production: renting lighting-equipment, sound, accessories for the camera and all of these costs tied to the shooting of the documentary. Like this we can bring the team to Armenia where we'll record the first two weeks of November, the last time before Armen leaves his country behind.

THE TEAM...

I'm Arevik Arabian, the writer and director. Samuel Navarrete will be my assistant, cinematographer and soundman. Meanwhile Ainoha, Sona, Jonathan and Marta are helping us in the production.

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