Milena Aboyan

Milena Aboyan was born a Yazidi Kurd in Armenia in 1992. In 2010 she began a four-year acting training program in Germany. During the program, she played parts in several theatrical productions. After receiving her acting degree, she changed disciplines and began to focus on writing. She started working as an assistant dramatic advisor for an early-evening ARD series. In 2015, she began studying screenwriting at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. In 2019 she won the Emden Screenplay Award. ELAHA is her final film at the Filmakademie. It was already awarded the “Kaiju Cinema Diffusion Prize” at the Locarno Film Festival.

“The history of women’s sexuality is a history of male narratives about female bodies. So I was not surprised, when I came across the product VirginiaCare. The product is designed to help women feign their supposed “virginity” using so-called blood capsules (in fact, the hymen is frequently misrepresented as a tissue that seals the vaginal opening. In most women it is instead a mucosal tissue that surrounds the vaginal opening). Many clinics also offer costly procedures to reconstruct the hymen (not even half of all women bleed after their first penetrative sexual intercourse). Is a product such as VirginiaCare or the reconstruction of the hymen by a plastic surgeon not objectionable? After all, these things fuel misconceptions that put massive pressure on the women who are affected. At the same time, measures such as these often represent the only way out that these women have left. An ethical balancing act. ELAHA is a story about an untamed woman, representing a lot of young women who are looking for identity, sexuality and belonging, and who commit to never being silent.”