Zako

Zako – this is how the Germans soldiers called the Soviet Armenian painter Sargis Mangasaryan, who lived through the hell of concentration 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 considered the traitors of the nation in the Soviet Union.

He had to draw several huge portraits of Stalin to have a chance to return home. Coming back to events of 1956, where Zako was visiting Picasso’s exhibition. He was staying in front of the huge painting of Guernica and seeing all the hell he passed during the days of the Second World War. 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 this is demonstrated through the perspective of the painter and the lens of relationships toward him, his attitude to systems, and how its imperfection was being built within this. Artist Sarkis Mangasaryan came into this world in 1917 with the "Brown" Empire under the name USSR and left this world with it.