Outliving Shakespeare

In an Armenian retirement home, a theater director sets out to stage Shakespeare’s Sins with a cast of residents. In the play, Shakespeare’s characters call him to account for their tragic fates—it’s a story that in rehearsal sparks conversations about love, life, and loss.

We follow the residents from casting to premiere. As the group grows closer, we see how the tragedies onstage are reflected in their own lives, which also feature love, betrayal, mourning, and exile. One resident finds and loses her Romeo, another is cast out by her own son, and yet another—who had briefly returned to her home in Artsakh (the Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh) after the ceasefire of a war still present in the region—must come back to the retirement home following the forced displacement of the entire Armenian population by Azerbaijan.

What begins as a light-hearted look at aging becomes an exploration of the loneliness and loss that so often accompany it. The dilapidated Soviet-era retirement home itself plays a supporting role, with its peeling paint, prowling cats, and modern care robot all coexisting under the same roof.