When Ani’s mother urges her to turn off the GPS, familiar Los Angeles streets fracture into surreal landscapes of memory and myth. Ani must find her way through them — only to realize she has to redefine home.
SYNOPSIS
Ani, a first-generation Armenian American in her twenties, crawls through late-afternoon Los Angeles traffic with her mother, Agatha, on speakerphone. Their trilingual chatter (Armenian, Russian, English) ricochets between grocery lists, family updates, and unfinished stories while the turn signal ticks like a metronome. A red-flag fire warning blinks overhead; Siri calmly offers directions. Then Ani taps the screen, and the GPS goes dark. With that small gesture, the city loosens. A familiar restaurant dissolves into an empty lot. The streetline begins to waver; buildings elongate, freeways buckle into boulevards, and a painted yellow horse steps off a sign and onto the road, becoming a guide. Agatha's voice keeps prattling, tender and nosy and funny, its kitchen clatter bleeding into the car, while outside Los Angeles opens into a seam in the city, then something older. Doorways appear in the street like thresholds. Ani follows the horse and drives through them, not around or past, but through, entering homes that feel both intimate and impossible: breakfast tables, ironing boards, homework spread across oilcloth, morning radio exercises in the language of childhood. With each house, Ani's rearview fills with women's faces, grandmothers upon grandmothers, stacked like strata of time. Agatha mentions a key hidden the night they left, as if holding it might keep the door existing. The bag grows monstrous; the rooms empty. At the far edge of this passage, the doors open onto a landscape far from Los Angeles: a Nagorno-Karabakh village where eight men, shadows made solid, march behind
Director Statement
I write this story from inside the fracture—shaped by a lineage of displacement as the daughter of refugees, and as someone who has watched “home” transform again and again through conflict and climate. My mother escaped the Armenian massacres in Soviet Azerbaijan, leaving behind not just her house, but her photographs, her language, entire threads of her life. In September 2023, history repeated itself: my remaining family members were forced to flee Nagorno-Karabakh, watching as white phosphorus burned our sacred mountains and the lives they built vanished overnight.
The places we try to call home are constantly shifting. Even in Los Angeles, wildfire skies and vanishing neighborhoods remind me that grief doesn’t always come from leaving—sometimes it grows in the ache of staying, as the world changes beneath your feet. Something Yellow is my attempt to hold that ache up to the light, tracing how the search for belonging continues long after exile or disaster—and how memory, loss, and resilience imprint themselves on every landscape we inhabit.
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Alisa Petrosova
Alisa Petrosova is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and filmmaker whose work explores displacement, collective memory, and cultural adaptation. She holds a BFA from Cooper Union and an MA in Climate & Society from Columbia University, grounding her films in both rigorous research and experimental visual language. In 2024, she was named one of Grist’s 50 Fixers—a list of leaders working on solutions to the planet’s biggest challenges—for her work bringing climate research into film and television.
As Director of Climate Storytelling Programs at Good Energy, Petrosova has helped major studios and shows integrate nuanced climate narratives into mainstream entertainment, working across projects that range from independent films to large-scale productions.
Her project We Are Our Mountains, an artist book and installation on genocide and ecocide in Nagorno-Karabakh, has been featured in outlets including Frieze Magazine. Her practice centers Armenian histories, environmental change, and the emotional experience of place, with a focus on how inherited grief and resilience live in the body and the landscape.
Gaia Alari is an Italian visual artist, award-winning illustrator, and animation filmmaker known for her emotionally charged, hand-drawn, frame-by-frame animation. Trained in medicine before pursuing art full time, she is a self-taught illustrator whose work has been exhibited with galleries across Europe and featured by institutions and outlets including MoMA, The New York Times, Centre Pompidou, and Rolling Stone. Alari regularly collaborates with major international music labels—among them Warner, Atlantic Records, Sub Pop, Nonesuch, SaddleCreek, Full Time Hobby, Sacred Bones, and Jagjaguwar—and has contributed to award-winning projects such as a Coldplay lyric video honored at the UK Music Video Awards.
Her animations, often created as a one‑woman team, are celebrated for their textured, psychologically rich depictions of the human body and inner life, using charcoal and oil pastels on paper to explore transformation, memory, and ambivalent emotion. As co-director and lead animator of Something Yellow, Alari brings this singular visual language to a story of solastalgia, translating complex emotional states into living, evolving images.
Caitlin Nasema Cassidy is an award-winning actor, director, and producer based in New York City, making experimental performance that is physical, collaborative, and poetic. Named a Leading Climate Creative by Grist, her practice is rooted in joy, embodied research, and (com)post-activism, often working at the intersection of climate crisis, more‑than‑human worlds, and SWANA (South West Asian and North African) narratives.
Her performance work includes New York Times Critic’s Picks The Vagrant Trilogy at The Public Theater and Pay No Attention to the Girl with Target Margin Theater, as well as the world premiere of Paradise at Central Square Theater, for which she received the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Actress. Cassidy is Co‑Artistic Director of LubDub Theatre Company and currently Artist‑in‑Residence at Georgetown University’s Earth Commons Institute for the Environment and Sustainability, where she develops climate-centered, community-engaged performance projects.
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