LA Native Director Puts Spotlight on Local Armenian Community

Chambers has lived in Los Angeles all his life, but he never knew any Armenians personally. He attended Wesleyan University in Connecticut and later the American Film Institute in Los Angeles and later started working on independent films with the hope that he would be making films himself. He moved away from filmmaking to shooting TV promotional spots and to his surprise, found that he excelled at them. The process was exhausting, as he said, he has done about 4,000 to 5,000 of them to date. “They were six-and-a-half day weeks,” he said.

He decided a few years ago that the time was right to throw himself into his first film.

“I was working non-stop for quite a while. I finished one big project and looked around and [making my own film] was getting further and further away,” he said, arriving at the existential question: “What have you done with your life?”

Thus, he said, he quit his day job and threw himself into the project that eventually became “Aram Aram.”

Chambers started doing research on the Armenian community in 2010. He knew only the stereotypes he had seen on the news or heard about and he wanted to understand more, including the story of immigrants in the community.

Once he was done with a draft of a story, he handed it around to his new contacts in the Armenian community in order to get the voice right. “I wanted it to be more authentic,” he said.

In fact, many of the locals that he met in Little Armenia and advised him “have become my extended family.”

In a statement he had released earlier, he said, “Growing up in Los Angeles, I have long been fascinated by the Armenian community – it is an insular group, widely stereotyped and widely misunderstood. I realized that I had never seen an American film made about Armenians in America and I became intrigued…. In making ‘Aram, Aram’ I wanted to tell a universal story set within a specific milieu that had not been seen in American film before. I wanted to make a film that touched on the simple, profound value of a tender touch and I wanted to tap into something universal. ‘Aram, Aram’ centers around the theme of every child’s fundamental need for a father figure. The story plays out within the Armenian community of Little Armenia in Los Angeles, but the plot is one that could have taken place in any number of American immigrant communities.”

He soon realized that Armenians love to talk, especially about their collective and individual histories to someone who is unfamiliar with the subject.

Chambers learned, among other things, that Armenians are not a homogenous group, coming here from different places and bringing with them their different stories.

Of course, another star of the film is the city itself, which is “strangely diverse and yet self-segregating.”

Much of the film is set in a shoe repair shop belonging to Jack Hagopian, a man who has a similar story to the grandfather in the movie. In real life, Hagopian trained as a professional pianist before relocating to LA from Beirut and opening Hyperion Shoe Repair.

The film has already had a great reception in the US, where it was selected to be shown at the Los Angeles Film Festival in June.

Chambers said that the film will also be shown in the Montreal Film Festival on September 1. After that, he plans to bring the film to Fresno, Los Angles and Boston. It will open on October 15 at the Glendale Civic Theatre at the Americana and in Watertown on November 1.

For more information on the film, check out its facebook page at

https://www.facebook.com/AramAramFilm?pnref=lhc