‘The Last Repair Shop,’ Featuring Key Armenian Character, Wins Oscar

“The Last Repair Shop,” a documentary film that features Steve Bagmanyan, who faced ethnic persecution in Azerbaijan in the 1980s, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film on Sunday.

The film is directed by Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers and produced by Los Angeles Times Film Studio.
The film tells the story of four devoted craftspeople who help keep over 80,000 student musical instruments in good repair for the Los Angeles Unified School District. The film blends the unexpectedly intimate personal histories of the repair people with emotional, firsthand accounts from the actual student musicians for whom their instruments made all the difference.

Bagmanyan is the general manager of the repair shop. Alongside Bagmanyan, the film introduces a technician from each department: Dana Atkinson, in the strings division, who takes us to his personal breaking point as a young man confronting his sexuality; Paty Moreno, in charge of brass and the sole woman in the shop, who chronicles her pursuit of the American dream as a Mexican immigrant and single mother; Duane Michaels, a quirky, self-described hillbilly who fixes the woodwind instruments and shares the rip-roaring tale of how his $20 fiddle took him on tour with Elvis; and finally Steve himself, who learned to tune pianos in America after surviving a harrowing escape from ethnic persecution in Azerbaijan in the late 1980s, a conflict again in the headlines today.

“The Last Repair Shop” is currently streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.