"Ordinary Genocide: Sumgait, February 1988" is a co-creation of veteran journalist Marina Grigoryan and former RA ombudsman now National Assembly deputy, Larisa Alverdyan.

Some of the film's disturbing photo and video material is from archives not yet seen by the general public.

The city of Sumgait is located near the coast of the Caspian Sea and was perhaps one of the most polluted in the entire Soviet Union. Sumgait itself is only thirty kilometers north of the capital in Baku, which has many oil refineries in the Caspian Sea. It had been renovated in the 1960s and had become a leading industrial city with oil refineries and petrochemical plants built during that era. Its population at that time was only 60,000; however, by the late 1980s, with an Armenian population of about 17,000, it had swollen to over 223,000 and overcrowding among other social problems had begun plaguing the city's residents. According to Soviet government officials, at least two thousand former convicts had been relocated to Sumgait during the 1980s.

Armin T. Wegner, whose photographic collection documents conditions in Armenian deportation camps in 1915-1916, was born in Germany in 1886. At the outbreak of World War I, he enrolled as a volunteer nurse in Poland during the winter of 1914-1915, and was decorated with the Iron Cross for assisting the wounded under fire. In April 1915, following the military alliance of Germany and Turkey, he was sent to the Middle East as a member of the German Sanitary Corps.

In 1915 first violent acts committed against Armenians under the guise of the War and on January 2 after the withdrawal of Russian troops most of the Armenian and Assyrian refugees going from Urmia, Salmast and other surrounding settlements to Nor Jugha were attacked and killed by Turkish and Kurdish armed forces. January 12 Slaughter of 107 Armenians took place in the village of Avgharik. 

During the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878 the Russian troops gained victories both on the Balkan and the Caucasian fronts. In the Balkans, the Russian troops occupied Bulgaria and advanced to the outskirts of Istanbul, while on the Caucasian war stage, they took Ardahan, Bayazet, Alashkert, Kars and Erzurum, i.e., a considerable segment of Western Armenia, as well as Batumi. The Turks had to terminate the war operations and seek for peace.