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ZAKO

By Tigran ARAKELYAN

True Story - Development 2025

The story of the Soviet Armenian painter Sargis Mangasaryan, who used his skills to draw portraits of his captors to survive A Nazi Camp during the Second World War.

- Year of production
- 2025
- Genres
- True Story, Biography, Animation
- Countries
- ARMENIA
- Languages
- ARMENIAN, GERMAN, RUSSIAN
- Budget
- 3 - 5 M$
- Duration
- 85 mn
- Director(s)
- Tigran ARAKELYAN
- Writer(s)
- Edgar BAGHDASARYAN
- Producer(s)
- Susanna KHACHATRYAN (OnOff Studio)
- Synopsis
- Zako – this is how the Germans soldiers called the Soviet Armenian painter Sargis Mangasaryan who lived through the hell of military camps and survived thanks to his talent.
  
  Zako finds a way to survive by drawing portraits of his tormentors. He tried to run several times but each time he ended up in a worse concertation camp. Even after the war was over, he was in danger of exile to Siberia, as the prisoners of war were considered the traitors of the nation in the Soviet Union. Here also he had to draw several huge portraits of Stalin to have a chance to return home.
  
  Coming back to the events of 1956 when Zako was visiting the Picassos exhibition with his friends. Mesmerized friends freeze before Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”. Zako is overwhelmed, it’s like he has seen this so many times… A woman's voice from the speaker constantly reminds the exhibition is closing, and museum rooms should be cleared. The lights turn out, Zako and his friends start walking backward, like they’re coming out of the church. They keep looking at the paintings.
  “We shouldn’t have come here”
  “You understand now that great art has passed us by…”
  “All of us are still unripe fruits… green and crude. And this is what we wasted all of our money for – to understand it.”
  “How do we paint now?”
  
  He realized how unripped he stayed during all those years by drawing portraits and even though he was fighting for freedom his artistic growth was limited by systems impact.
  
  In this pretext, the film raises a number of questions on a range of universal human relationships. And all of this is demonstrated through the perspective of the painter and the lens of relationships toward him, his attitude to systems, and how their imperfection was being built within this.
  
  The artist Sargis Mangasaryan was born in 1917 – the year of the October Revolution and died In 1991 – the year when the Soviet Union ceased to exist.