Getting started

It was on Labor Day that my cousin Harry Vorperian called me while I was at a barbecue with friends. He had a project and he needed some help, could I help him? Sure, I said, I could help, but what could I help with? My cousin is an artist. I'm incapable of drawing even the most basic stick figure. He needed a writer, he said, for a film. A documentary. I've never written anything more than a 20-page term paper in college and certainly never anything that resembled a script. But I'm a journalist and I can interview people and I can write about it and that's what he wanted.

He told me the story. I was hooked. I wanted in. This is the story we're going to tell:

In December 1988 two worlds collapsed in Armenia; the physical world and the emotional world. A 6.9-magnitude earthquake rattled the fragile buildings of a fragile nation. As the walls came tumbling down, so did the lives of those inside them.

Armine Lambarian, now 30, was a 14-year-old girl inside one of those buildings. At 11:43 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1988, the sewing factory her class was visiting on a field trip collapsed, crushing Armine’s legs. The left one was so badly injured it had to be amputated. Her 8-year-old sister perished in the earthquake. As a young girl in a struggling country, Armine learned to rebuild her strength and reclaim her life.

In a country where hardship is commonplace, Armine proved that to persevere is to excel. With little in the way of assistance for the handicapped she rebuilt her life, went to medical school and today works as a surgeon in a pediatric hospital in Yerevan.

In the early years of Armine’s strenuous recovery, Armenia was undergoing its own life-altering change. The walls of communism were collapsing across the Soviet Union and new independent nation-states were learning to survive in a cut-throat capitalist world.

“11:43” will document two lives; that of a woman struggling to find her legs in an ever-changing society and the life of a people struggling to gain footing in a new world.