Amerikatsi

Emmy Award-winning actor Michael Goorjian, who also wrote and directed Amerikatsi, plays Charlie, who as a child barely escaped the Armenian genocide, but now, after World War II returns in search of a homeland. But Armenia is under Stalin’s regime, and Charlie’s soulful innocence quickly lands him in prison on the Kafka-esque charge of wearing a tie -- the kind of bourgeois crime that calls for solitary confinement lest other prisoners be similarly corrupted. Charlie comes to discover that a window high in his cell gives him a view into a single apartment across the way, a view into the lives of an Armenian couple whose world becomes his world, both literally and magically. With echoes of both Life is Beautiful and Rear Window, Charlie survives his brutish incarceration vicariously, experiencing art and music and a human connection that, in the end, truly brings him home. (Woodstock Film Festival)