How an Armenian film brought me back to writing
By Paul Chaderjian
The keys on my MacBook click in the quiet of my West Los Angeles apartment. I have not written an essay like this since the Palisades and Eaton fires. Nearly a year has gone into medical appointments, surgery, fatigue and wondering how much more treatment my body could take. Most days, I had little energy left for writing.
Tonight, after a weekend by the ocean and a movie at home, I find myself at the keyboard again.
My niece Ani insisted on treating me to a stay at Terranea in Rancho Palos Verdes so we could celebrate the holiday together. I needed the change of scenery. In Room 5124, I had a few days to steady myself between surgery and another round of chemotherapy.
Stage IV colorectal cancer, with metastasis to my liver, had rearranged my life. It also made me persistent about urging the people I love to discuss their own risks and screening needs with their doctors.
The ocean gave me a few hours each day when my body felt less like a battlefield and more like a place I still recognized.
I knew that coastline from my student days, when I shot Super 8 film there with Kim Crawford. Decades later, I found myself recording it again, this time on my phone. Nune Yesayan’s “Qamuts Qshvats Husher” came to mind as I watched the water. Her voice has always brought me closer to home, wherever I happen to be.
When I returned to my apartment on Sunday evening, I picked up the remote and pressed the Prime Video button. I wanted to watch A Winter’s Song, by Angela Asatrian, a young Armenian-American filmmaker whose name I had only recently learned. Watching during its streaming debut weekend seemed a small, useful way to support her work.
Krista Marina plays Liana, a singer with three weeks to make a demo. She travels to Armenia looking for inspiration and finds music, romance and a connection to the country. Krista also wrote original music for the film, including “Yeraz.”
I knew Krista from the Armenia Fund Telethon. I knew Edgar Damatian and Kev Orkian from those broadcasts, too. Watching them brought back my final Telethon: Edgar’s open, steady presence, Krista’s warmth, Kev’s chaotic, deeply Armenian comedy. Now they had parts in a feature film I could call up from my couch.
Outside my window, lights cover the new apartment and office buildings in Sawtelle. A few steps from my driveway is the former home of KSCI Channel 18. Years before streaming, we had driven our videotapes there so Armenian families could watch them on television.
I could not watch this film without thinking about those tapes.
Before I could borrow a camera
My father kept his Super 8 camera in a brown case that smelled of new leather. He did not let me touch it. Film cost money, and the camera itself seemed too valuable to entrust to a child.
I wanted to record things long before I had the means to do it.
In high school, Fresno Cable’s community access Channel 14 gave me my first chance to work with a studio camera. Later, at USC, cameras and lighting kits sat behind counters and in storage rooms. Access required admission, enrollment, identification. Even editing depended on getting time at a station. Wanting to make a film and having the equipment to make one remained separate problems.
There were people who made the distance seem smaller. Seeing Stefani Booroojian on Fresno television helped me imagine an Armenian name in an American newsroom. Filmmakers Ara Madzounian, Vahe Babaian and Nigol Bezjian made their work with 16-millimeter film and improvised sets. I watched Sarky Mouradian’s films featuring Adiss Harmandian. Each gave me something I could point to, something beyond my own wish to do this.
At USC, Carol Sobieski called me “kiddo” and taught me to account for every word. T. Coraghessan Boyle taught me to listen for rhythm and pay attention to the pace of a story. Journalists at KCBS and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner showed me how much an apparently small detail could reveal.
Carol’s insistence that each word earn its place followed me from screenplays into newsrooms. It has given me plenty to reconsider on this page, too.
I also remember how little we needed to recognize ourselves on television. Armenian Teletime aired on Saturdays. A green curtain. A microphone. A cassette tape. For a boy searching the screen for Armenian faces and Armenian words, that modest production offered something I could find almost nowhere else.
Other communities bought airtime at KSCI, too. We shared a station while trying to reach our own people across a sprawling city.
The Saturday tapes
At Horizon TV, we began sending cameras out to report on Armenian life. Garbis Titizian led the effort, with Salpi Ghazarian and Roxanne Makasjian helping guide the work. Our studio occupied a conference room.
The Vatche and Tamar Manoukian family donated cameras and editing systems. Their gift helped us cover the Spitak earthquake, the Sumgait massacres and the war in Artsakh. These were stories we needed to tell, and now we had equipment we could use to tell them.
Families with their first camcorders recorded April 24 commemorations and sent us their tapes. Some arrived with Levon Travel customers carrying them across the diaspora. The recordings made their way to our conference room in Glendale, where we prepared them for broadcast.
Stepan Partamian, Chris Guldalian, Albert Kodagolian and I took turns driving the edited programs to KSCI’s control room in West LA each Saturday. Getting our work onto television included this very ordinary task: somebody had to take the cassette across town.
I live near that destination now. Back then, I knew it as the place where we handed over the week’s work.
Other people preserved the community on audio. Seta Harboyan-Simonian and Hratch Simonian carried reel-to-reel recorders and reels of tape into churches, school halls and basements. They recorded for Hamazkayin radio. Long before their son Sebu reached his own audience, his parents were collecting the voices and music around them.
When I hear Sebu Simonian bring Armenian folk music into his work, I think of Seta and Hratch with those machines. I hear a related impulse in Sirusho’s “Pre Gomesh,” with its use of Komitas’ voice. The music has changed, as it should. Knowing something about the people who preserved it makes listening a different experience for me.
The filmmaker I imagined
In February 1991, at the keyboard of my first personal computer, I invented an Armenian-American filmmaker named Sev Minassian.
He appeared in my short story “The Beautiful People,” published in Asbarez. Sev wanted to direct a new version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. I gave him an Armenian executive producer named Siranoush and a reporter, Michael, to follow his setbacks and successes.
I chose those names deliberately. I wanted Armenians making the decisions, directing the film, taking up space in the story. On paper, I could put them there without asking anyone’s permission.
Decades later, I found myself following the work of a real Sev. Sev Ohanian, another USC film school graduate, co-wrote and produced Searching and went on to produce Sinners. The name caught my attention, but the work held it. Here was the ambition I had given a fictional character, finding an audience beyond our community.
I had spent years wondering whether there would be room for people like the ones I invented. Watching his films, I could stop wondering about that much.
My own attempts took a different course. One screenplay followed a Hollywood actor captured during the early war in Artsakh. Another, CNN Reporting, which I wrote with Chris Guldalian, followed a journalist searching for a connection to the homeland.
Sessions dealt with AIDS and homophobia in the young Armenian republic. We reached the U.S. production stage with commitments from Jeremy Sisto and Marisa Ryan. Albert Kodagolian planned to direct it.
Albert had left his pre-med classes and come to Horizon to ask me how to get into the business. Later, he produced and directed million-dollar Super Bowl commercials. Then illness ended his life. I still think about the work he did not get to make.
Allan Yekikian, another colleague we lost too soon, co-wrote an essay with me in 2010 calling for a new Zartonk, an awakening. We urged young Armenians to use cameras, digital tools and social media to tell their own stories.
Watching younger filmmakers now, I think about both men. I am glad to see work we hoped for. I would have liked to watch it with them.
Angela’s film joins work by Atom Egoyan, Arsinee Khanjian, Michael Goorjian, Alek Keshishian and many others. There are more Armenian filmmakers to follow now than the boy watching Armenian Teletime could have imagined.
The names I knew
During my cancer treatment at UCLA, I encountered the Manoukian name again. It appears on the Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Medical Building. The family that helped put cameras in our hands had also supported the institution where I now depended on other people’s skills.
At UCLA, my colorectal surgeon, Dr. Kevork Kazanjian, and my liver surgeon, Dr. Vatche Agopian, took on the work of treating my cancer. I knew what the Manoukian family’s generosity had meant when I needed equipment. I came to understand it differently as a patient.
Araksya Karapetyan helped me through another difficult return.
Years earlier, I had asked her to co-host the Armenia Fund Telethon with me. She accepted without hesitation. I spent years working on that broadcast, helping connect people across the diaspora with projects in Armenia and Artsakh: roads, homes, hospitals, schools and water systems. The loss of Artsakh remains painful. It does not erase the people those projects served.
At Al Jazeera, covering the loss of Artsakh and the genocide in Gaza left me questioning what my work could accomplish. I kept describing the destruction of communities and wondering how much difference another story could make.
By November 29, 2025, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported more than 70,000 people killed in Israel’s offensive, according to Reuters. A number could establish the scale. It could not convey all the lives inside it.
After leaving Qatar and returning to California, I still carried the exhaustion of that work. Araksya helped bring me into the FOX 11 newsroom. She had survived the Spitak earthquake, the same disaster we had covered at Horizon when my own connection to Armenia was taking shape.
I had once invited her into a broadcast that mattered to me. Now she helped me return to a newsroom when I needed direction.
Working alongside her gave me renewed purpose. I could not undo what had happened in Artsakh or Gaza. I could work with someone who understood why those losses followed me home.
After the film
A Winter’s Song sent me back through these memories without offering an answer to all of them. Albert and Allan are still gone. My treatment continues. Some of the films I wanted to make remain part of an earlier life.
Yet there is Krista, acting and singing in a film set in Armenia. There are Edgar and Kev, people I remember from a television set, now reaching viewers I will never meet. Angela has made something of her own, and I can watch it here.
I had hoped to make films, too. Watching other people do it does not erase that wish, but their work gives me pleasure I would not have understood when I was younger. Some of what I wanted for myself, I also wanted for us. I can see it happening without my name in the credits.
When the film ended, I stepped outside and looked toward the old KSCI site. I thought about the programs we delivered and the families who watched them. I remembered how much effort it took to get an hour of Armenian television on the air.
Back at Terranea that weekend, I had lifted my phone and recorded the coastline. As a boy, I could not touch my father’s camera. Now I carried one in my pocket.
After everything, I still wanted to record what I saw.
Paul Chaderjian is a Los Angeles-based broadcast journalist and the author of the novel “Letters to Barbra.”
Follow Paul on YouTube: @pchadNEWS.
An additional reference from the original essay
Sayat Nova — background on the poet and musician.