Sona’s writing moves across memoir, film, television, essay, and emerging media. Across forms, her work returns to memory, violence, comic disruption, spiritual inquiry, and the unstable boundary between the stories we receive and the stories we learn to see differently.

Scher/AZAD: A Memoir of Inheritance, A Method of Liberation

in development

Drawing together personal history, ancestral inheritance, West Asian storytelling, and contemplative practice, Scher/AZAD traces the return to Aleppo that led Sona to rediscover 180 hand-painted shadow puppets belonging to her great-great-grandfather, Abkar Knadjian.

The formally mischievous hybrid memoir asks how the stories we receive shape the lives we live, and how learning to see more might become a method of liberation.

The Attic of the Mind

in development

A salon series staged inside the Aleppo attic where Sona rediscovered her family’s shadow puppets.

Each gathering brings her into long-form conversation with a disruptive thinker, storyteller, or visionary around perception, paradox, consciousness, and play—with the puppets as unruly participants.

Quantum Mischief

in development

A puppet micro-comedy series bringing the irreverent intelligence of Karagöz shadow theater to the contradictions, certainties, and absurdities of contemporary life.

Three Apples Fell From Heaven

pilot

An intergenerational drama tracing an Armenian family in Aleppo across the twentieth century, where public history and private memory continually reshape one another.

The First Full Moon

Fearture Screenplay

Zulal Kazazian can’t seem to get pregnant or make art that is taken seriously. When devastating events drive her from New York back to Aleppo—a place she has avoided for twenty years—she must confront the family secrets behind the “curse” she has always believed was placed upon her.

Selected for the 2011 Sundance Institute/RAWI Screenwriters Lab and the 2012 Dubai Film Connection.

Toujours

Short Film

A woman reignites an old, unconsummated love affair—with fatal consequences.

Written and directed by Sona Tatoyan. Produced by Ted Feldman, Andrei Bowden-Schwartz, and Sona Tatoyan.

Official Selection, 2012 Arpa International Film Festival.