Elina at her film debut

At a film screening at the American University of Armenia, a young woman named Arin stepped onto the screen. Through her, TUMO alum Elina Yerkanyan invited the audience into a story about inherited memory, unspoken trauma, and the weight of history that never really goes away.

Her debut film, Still in Those Deserts, follows Arin as she traces the memory of her ancestors’ experience of the Armenian Genocide while witnessing new displacements, including the forced exodus from Artsakh in 2023. It is a film about how the past lives inside the present, especially for young Armenians finding their way now.

The team at the film debut

The semi-documentary brings together a new generation of Armenian creatives who are turning collective memory into collective creation. And for Elina, it was also a reunion.

“It was really special that part of the team I worked with on the film were also TUMO alumni,” she says. “We created this really fun, creative symbiosis, built on years of growing up and learning side by side.”

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Elina wrote and directed the film, drawing from the creative writing foundation she first built at TUMO, where she completed her first script in a workshop. She led the initial editing process and oversaw the film’s line producing, keeping the team’s workflow and deadlines on track.

Backstage of Still in Those Deserts

The collaboration included TUMOians across disciplines. Designer and model Berta Yeghiazaryan played the lead role and created the film’s poster. Animator and illustrator Davit Petrosyan brought the conceptual animation scenes to life. Musicians Karine Avetisyan and Levon Yerkanyan, both Vahé and Lucie Award recipients, co-composed the original score, with Karine also leading the sound design with the help of TUMO Lab Leader Shahen Khandkaryan. Together, they built a visual and emotional world that feels both deeply Armenian and unmistakably modern.

“We also used music by contemporary Armenian artists like Tigran Hamasyan, Hayk Karoyi, Artyom Manukyan, and Hogh,” Elina shares. “They gave their permission personally, which made it even more meaningful.”

Backstage of Still in Those Deserts

Elina began developing Still in Those Deserts as part of her creative capstone project at AUA. The film grew out of questions that have followed her since childhood: What do we really inherit from our ancestors beyond names and stories, and how does the trauma of the Armenian Genocide still shape who we are today? Through Arin, she set out to translate these abstract feelings into images, giving them a face and a body, and tracing how one family’s past quietly leaks into the way a young woman moves through the world.

Before filmmaking felt like her path, Elina was deep in the TUMO ecosystem, trying out different disciplines that were, without her noticing, shaping her cinematic voice.

TUMO’s focus areas are built for that kind of wandering, letting teens jump between art, technology, and storytelling instead of choosing just one.

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Elina started in Drawing, where she learned that a single line can hold more mood than a paragraph. Photography came next and sharpened her eye, teaching her where to place the frame and how to catch a story in a passing gesture or an ordinary object. In The Art and Craft of Animation learning lab with Gary Schwartz, a longtime TUMO collaborator, she saw what it meant to build something frame by frame with other people and began to understand movement and timing on screen from the inside out.

From there, she treated TUMO as a testing ground for her future film language. She moved through labs like Experimental Stop Motion Animation, Write and Animate with Nate Cash, Creative Writing with Columbia University, and many more. Each one added a new piece to her toolkit, another way to braid image and text, to use the screen as a place to store feeling and memory.

Those formative years helped Elina find her rhythm and connect with peers who would eventually stand beside her on set.

“TUMO gave me a sense of direction,” she recalls. “It is where I first learned how different forms of art can merge and feed into each other. The friendships and skills I built there stayed with me.”

Backstage of Still in Those Deserts

In Still in Those Deserts, the desert is less a backdrop and more a temperature the film sits in. Arin moves through present-day streets, family apartments, news clips and half-remembered stories that share the same dry air. The Armenian Genocide and the recent displacement from Artsakh show up as textures in her life rather than history lessons, so the film’s politics arrive through mood before they arrive through words.
“Many of us are still, in some way, in those deserts,” Elina says. “But what keeps us moving forward is collaboration, support, and the will to create, even in the hardest moments.”

Since its debut screening at AUA, Still in Those Deserts has traveled beyond Armenia, with selections at festivals such as the Brazilian “Mostra de Cinema das Missões” and the “NanoCon” international film festival in the United States. It will appear next as part of the “KIN” festival this December, before coming home to TUMO for a special screening with the next generation of storytellers.

For anyone who was not in the room at AUA, Still in Those Deserts is now available to watch in full below.