In Front of Us

In consideration of the sensitive nature of the content of this document. We kindly ask you to exercise the utmost discretion in ensuring the confidentiality of the material.

Emma (name is changed) is a judge at the Superior Court in California; Lala is a teacher and single mother from Ejmiatsin, a small town in the Republic of Armenia. By all accounts, their lives would have remained utterly separate if not for the grisly killing of Lala’s older sister and Europe’s first ethnic cleansing since the Yugoslav wars.

Between 2020 and 2023 the Republic of Azerbaijan, a wealthy petro-state allied with Turkey and Russia, undertook a series of successful offensives against neighbouring Armenia and the disputed, ethnic-Armenian populated region of Nagorno-Karabakh. In 2020, Azerbaijan attacked Nagorno-Karabakh and waged a 44-day war capturing much of the disputed region’s territory. In 2022, it attacked Armenia proper, occupying a wedge of territory within Armenia’s internationally recognized borders. The year after that, it began a 9-month siege against Nagorno-Karabakh which ended with the violent expulsion of all 100,000 of the region's residents.

The wars were brutal, with artillery, and drones, beheadings, ethnic cleansing, and genocidal utterings comparing a whole nation to “dogs” and insects. Some of the most terrible crimes committed were published on social media, of which the most infamous was the mutilation of the body of an Armenian woman, who was stripped naked, dismembered, and had curse words carved into her body. That woman, Gayane, was Lala’s older sister.

Since 2020, together with allies like Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC’s first-ever prosecutor, Emma has been working to help the victims of Azerbaijan’s aggression. A descendant of survivors of the Armenian Genocide, and a child of Lebanon’s Civil War, Emma was compelled to act by the new horrors she witnessed, including the video of Gayane. She began to live a double life, presiding over hearings during the day as a judge, and volunteering to help build an international legal case at night — where Lala has become a star witness.

From the courtrooms in California to Armenia’s war-scarred borderlands, to the ICC in the Hague, and to the halls of Congress in Washington DC, our film follows Emma’s and Lala’s inexhaustible fight for some measure of justice. Not only a war/legal drama, the film is also a character study exploring how a judge comes to terms with the limits of law and how a school teacher gripped by personal tragedy gains the courage to challenge, face to face, some of the most powerful people in the world.