Living with the Dead

Directed By Christine Vartoughian

Runaway girl Max McLean ventures into the forest with a young man called Ish who helps her find meaning in her boyfriend's suicide.

  • ABOUT
  • BIO
After her boyfriend's suicide, high school senior Max McLean falls into a haze of drugs and sex, concluding with an unsuccessful attempt at taking her own life. Now haunted by visions of her dead love, Max runs away, ending up in a small town where she meets Ish, a free-spirited young man who may be the one person in the world who can break through to the disturbed Max before its too late.

Christine Vartoughian is an award-winning, Armenian-American writer and director whose work has shown at Lincoln Center, Museum of the Moving Image, and whose feature film about love and suicide, Living with the Dead: A Love Story, has been awarded the Audience Choice Award at The Art of Brooklyn Film Festival, Best Feature Film at Aberdeen Film Festival, and is available on Apple TV and Amazon, in the U.S. and internationally. Her screenplay, The Great Perhaps, is an adaptation of the Joe Meno novel, which was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and has been a part of film festivals and script competitions.

Christine founded (Screen)Play Press, a publishing company for yet-to-be-produced film scripts. Her feature script, Young Monsters, was published in 2022 and her short fiction has been published in The Bookends Review, Quibble Lit, 805 Lit + Art, Open: A Journal of Arts and Letters, and Audience Askew. Her debut collection of short stories is set to be published in 2025. She lives in New York City.