I’m Armenian, and April 24th was another commemoration of the genocide of Armenia people by Turkey. The perpetrator never admitted the crime. I was raised with that, this question: how do you actually find the truth of such a traumatic event? I'm obsessed with that issue.

I started in theater and I wanted to write plays, but I never really found an original voice as a playwright.

That's a very odd notion because it involves seeing money up there on the screen - if something cost $5 million to make, they want to see that $5 million up there.

I think the situation in Toronto is such that there are funding organizations which make it easy for a film to raise more money than it needs and very often that works against a film.

People make decisions that may have one intent and yet are somehow perverted into something else. And sometimes it's because of design. Sometimes it's because of happenstance. But very often, it's mysterious to them.

Though I am still very vulnerable to audiences—and it happens all the time - where for some reason the energy doesn’t connect and, since the film is very personal, obviously I am made to feel very vulnerable by that.

Working on the themes I was interested in, through the context of a particular family, was a very economical way of dealing with a lot of the issues I was concerned with.