Vardan is a lonely man in his fifties. He lives alone in an old apartment and works as a security guard. Every morning, he carefully sets the table, eats a boiled egg with tea, puts on a freshly ironed blue shirt, and goes to work. At work, every day is the same — surveillance screens and a colleague constantly solving crosswords. Vardan spends his days watching other people’s lives unfold, while remaining apart, on the other side of the screen, like a Robinson on his own island. His only companion is a goldfish in an aquarium. One day, he notices a woman dancing alone in an empty library on one of the monitors. She awakens something inside him. From that moment on, he begins to watch her every day. He thinks about her constantly, even sees her in his dreams. Finally, he decides to go to her —and finds himself on the other side of the screen he had been staring at for so many years.

"Instructions for the Future", an experimental documentary by Greta Harutyunyan, weaves together family VHS archives from the late 1990s and early 2000s with contemporary interviews, street encounters, and media fragments. Centered on a symbolic act of turning her family’s old camera back toward her aunt, the film initiates an intergenerational dialogue about expectation, identity, and destiny. Through intimate conversations and layered archival footage set against Armenia’s political upheavals, Greta explores the conflicting “instructions” imposed on a young woman’s life. Blurring personal memory with collective trauma, the film becomes both a search for an individual future and a meditation on a generation shaped by war, transition, and loss.