Years after campaigns against minority Armenians in Turkey caused his family to disperse and his mother to die before his eyes, Gorky found a 1912 photograph taken in the city of Van upon which he based drawings and paintings entitled The Artist and His Mother. The video Ararat (Excerpts) investigates the fraught history of Gorky's lost childhood through his protracted work on the image of himself at age 12, standing beside his mother Shushan. Derived from the feature-length film Ararat written and directed by Academy Award®-nominated director Atom Egoyan.