When Women Are the Breadwinners

Karina Khachatryan arrived in Los Angeles in 1992 with 250 dollars, two children, and a marriage already strained. She spoke almost no English. Over the next three decades she built restaurants, a sewing business, a travel agency, and a daycare, and became the sole provider for her family. Today, retired and tending her garden, she says she does not believe in love. Then, moments later, she describes exactly what love should be.

When Women Are the Breadwinners follows Karina and three other women in Los Angeles who out-earn the partners in their lives. Each receives her own portrait: the life as it is now, the success that made it possible, and the private cost underneath. The film asks what a woman trades to become the provider, and whether the scripts we inherited about love and partnership have caught up to how people actually live.

The film is made for women living this arrangement, for men who have no map for partnership with a higher-earning woman, and for immigrant communities still carrying older expectations. It will premiere on the festival circuit alongside community screenings with women's organizations, immigrant business networks, and Armenian cultural groups.