Mumma Bear Cushman

Alan Sarkissian is a documentary and video producer based in Australia, working under the Storyfirst Films banner. Mumma Bear Cushman began not in an archive, but at his mother’s kitchen table – in her own recollections, and those of her mother Mariam and that of another orphan, Araxie. Both orphans were raised in Greece in the care of Miss Emma Cushman. Araxie remained close to Emma into adulthood and corresponded with Lucius Thayer – her letters forming part of the same historical record Alan later drew on to verify the family’s story. That family memory, passed down and retold, sent Alan into the historical record to find the woman behind it.

Festival programmers see no shortage of important, worthy, heavy documentaries. Alan crafted Mumma Bear Cushman on his faith in the unconventional approach – a documentary which leads with personality, dry wit, and a true story too strange to need embellishing. The result was produced using his own Storyfelt Arc storytelling methodology – designed to bring real historical figures to audiences with the emotional immediacy of narrative film.