Noise

Michael Aloyan

When a deaf woman forms a bond with an unlikely stranger, the two are forced to communicate in the absence of language.

Michael Aloyan is an Armenian filmmaker who was raised in Los Angeles. Born to Armenian immigrants who fled the nation as it was shaken by war in the face of the Soviet Union’s collapse, his father was an ambulance driver (a graphic designer back in the home country) and his mother was a social worker (an aspiring concert pianist back home). Enthralled with films from a very young age, and supported by his cinephile father, he started making stop-motion animated films with his dad’s Hi-8 camera at the age of eight. Over the years Aloyan shifted towards live-action filmmaking. Seeing his passion for storytelling, his mother got him his own camera for his thirteenth birthday. That summer, he gathered his friends and made a 45-minute film. Aloyan rented out a local theater and charged $5 for admission, screening to a sold-out audience. He took the profits and invested them into making another film (an hour-long film noir) over the following school year. He continued to shoot shorts while in high school, casting his friends and classmates in a variety of films. His younger brother, Arman, began composing the score to all of his films. In his senior year, Aloyan directed a short called “Subhuman (Untermensch)”, which screened in over a dozen film festivals, winning several international awards and acquiring distribution in over 40 countries across the world. In his sophomore year of college, Aloyan penned “String”, an original TV pilot that he optioned to 20th Century Fox Television before his 20th birthday.

“I thought of the story for this film at a point in my life where I was feeling quite lonely and disconnected from the world, and coming out of a difficult relationship. Making this film became a therapeutic way of talking about relationships and communication in our modern age, as well as the role language plays in all that.”

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