The research of the life and the documented trial of the founder of Armenian film industry Daniel Dznuni presents the whole picture of an epoch when newly forming soviet states were trying to build their countries and how the period of Stalin repressions came to interfere with the prospects of development and independence for these countries. In April 1923, while heading the Main Political Department in the People’s Commissariat of Education, Dznuni initiated the creation of a film company and very soon also the other necessary establishments of film industry: movie theaters, construction company for film production and the first ever foreign brunch of a soviet state organization, which is the Iranian branch of Armenfilm company. The bloody 1937, the year that wiped out an entire generation of the brightest of Soviet intellectuals, did not pass him by: Daniel was arrested, like almost every notable personality of the Stalin era. The denunciation was written by the head of production department to the People’s Commissariat of Finance, with figures, facts and quotes about “wrecking work of the directorate of Armenfilm” – that is Daniel Dznuni. During his first interrogation, following his arrest in 1937, Dznuni asked for permission to give his testimony in writing. The National Archive has preserved for us this more than 100-page manuscript – the unpublished memoirs of the first Armenian producer, in the very modern sense of the word. In his consistent and detailed story as well as other documents included in his trial archive you can see how the system works. A system that sent the majority if not all intellectuals, and leaders of different fields to prisons and to exile, from where only a few ever returned. Dzuni was lucky enough to be released after 8 years of imprisonment. But was the freedom worth witnessing how the industry created by him was going to be gradually destroyed by newcomers.