by Artsvi Bakhchinyan
YEREVAN/LOS ANGELES — Screenwriter and director Nicole Ballivian is originally from Washington, DC. A graduate of the American University with a major in Film & Media Arts, she has a production background that includes work with Warner Bros. TV, Universal Pictures, and independent films.
Nicole has a remarkable talent for storytelling, blending humor with depth. Her script “Yemma” won the 2022 Pilot Award at the BlueCat Screenplay Competition, and her dramatic feature “Sleeping on Stones” was selected for the prestigious Sundance Screenwriters Lab.
She also wrote and directed the comedic short “Joe & the Shawl,” which won the Grand Prize at the 2021 New York Women in Film & Television Festival and the Audience Award at the 2020 VOX Feminae Film Festival. Her debut feature, “Driving to Zigzigland,” filmed in Los Angeles and Palestine, earned numerous international festival accolades.
Dear Nicole, I remember your film “Driving to Zigzigland,” filmed back in 2007. I was impressed by the humor and the hero, the Palestinian taxi driver, whose fate moves everyone. Your work spans comedy, drama, and international settings. How do your personal experiences and cultural background influence the stories you choose to tell?
It wasn’t just my personal experience I drew from in writing “Zigzigland.” There are so many absurdities in the immigrant experience to the United States. I grew up in Washington, DC, surrounded by everyone whose parents were immigrants. Every household had a different story of adaptation, one of both humor and pain, of sacrifice and love for family. There is so much automatically in common. For example, there is a film script I’m developing called Baggage that surrounds the stories of the luggage we take back to our home country from America. All immigrants here who travel back home need to take an extra luggage just for gifts, medicines, cigarettes, for family and friends and someone’s uncle two villages away. It’s the same thing for everyone, just hilarity in different languages.
Although you were born in the United States, Middle Eastern subjects are central in your work. Your characters are often Jews and Palestinians, whose conflict seems eternal. What has been the reaction from these communities to your films, and how do you think your work can foster healthy dialogue between them?
I’ve had a positive response overall from audiences throughout the years. Really there was only one pushback during a “Zigzigland” Q&A at Santa Barbara Film Festival where an audience member alluded to me being antisemitic. Comedy has been a wonderful way to convey concepts that are difficult to talk about, including political issues. Through laughter we can see things from a different angle. We can challenge the status quo freely. In the end, there is nothing like the sound of an audience laughing, whose identities are unknown.
Your films explore the intersection of identity and emigration. In today’s America, immigration issues have entered a new phase due to tougher policies. Do you see this as a source of new stories, even if they might be challenging to approach with humor?
What’s happening with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the US is a symptom of an empire falling rapidly. The horrors of this fascism are barely understood by Americans themselves. Not only has there been murder in broad daylight, there are children needing medical attention in the concentration camps. I am too stunned to even take in this news.
Being a Fourth Culture Kid, how has growing up across different cultures shaped the stories you want to tell?
Yes, a child of an immigrant to America learns their parents’ native culture, then the American culture, and then live a mix of it. Because of living in this mixed status, I have so much in common with most of my friends whose parents are immigrants as well. Somehow in this mixed identity, we recognize each other and find commonalities across our parents’ cultures. So, I’m able to understand a lot more about a culture I don’t belong to compared to the standard American whose ancestors immigrated on the Mayflower.
“Ballivian” does not sound like an Armenian surname. Could you please tell us about your ancestors?
It’s interesting you say it doesn’t sound like an Armenian surname as I’ve been told the opposite my whole life. There are several amateur genealogists in our family attempting to find our exact Armenian roots. They’ve found that they had to have come to Spain around the 1700s as this family then traveled to South America.
Yes, Vartan Matiossian, who researched the Armenians in Spain and Latin America, states that the Ballivián lineage existed in Spain from around the 9th century or so, and the Bolivian family descends from there. It is of Basque origin, and the study of the Ballivián family tree does not have any distant trace of Armenian connection. However, do you have connections with Armenian culture and artists?
Of course, I am friends with several Armenian filmmakers and musicians in Los Angeles, home to one of the most bountiful Armenian communities. Armenians here insist that I am Armenian and one woman working at a Saks Fifth Ave store gave me history of where my family comes from (an old village that’s now Turkey?) and supposedly there’s a science institute with my last name. My cable installer here gave me his business card and we cracked up. His name was “Nigol Balivian.”
That is funny. Nevertheless, might it happen one day you will have some Armenian-related project?
I would love to co-produce an Armenian project if there’s the right opportunity to do so!
And what project are you working on now? Is it again related to the Middle East?
I am currently finishing acquiring finance for a short film that’s a visualization of a free Palestine. It’s entitled “The Call” and it depicts the moment we get the phone call that Palestine has been liberated. We seek to change the narrative. We want to inject a new effervescent emotion that gets us to the other side of death and destruction. We know that the future is freedom, no matter who impedes it now. Our cast includes Mohamed Hadid, Marcia Cross, Amanda Seales, Ahmed Shihab Eldin and others.
