Growing up in Armenia, Western films and TV were my portal to another world. While my parents worked long hours to provide for my four siblings and me, I became the keeper of our little universe - filling the silence with whatever played on our aging cable TV. Those flickering images felt like postcards from a far-off place we could never touch, shimmering with a kind of magic I didn’t yet understand. Then I learned they were made by filmmakers - real people shaping dreams into moving pictures. At eleven, with a secondhand Sony 8mm Handycam sent from my grandmother in the States, I began staging my siblings in short films, directing them through imagined worlds, and in the process, discovering my own.