Still from 1489, dir. Shoghakat Vardanyan (2023).
The first London-based festival celebrating Armenian cinema was hosted at the ICA from December 6 to 8, 2024. It follows the Armenian Film Society’s annual film festival in Los Angeles. An impressive selection of recent films from Armenia was screened along with emerging filmmakers from the British Armenian diaspora.
The wounds of the recent war in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) are still fresh. Caught in the crossfire of its neighbors—Russia, Turkey, and Iran—Armenia went through a number of bloody conflicts after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the mercy of great powers in the region, the small country struggles for its survival and identity.
Considered an ancestral homeland by Armenians, Artsakh was first blockaded then occupied by Azerbaijan in late 2023. Following the official dissolution of Artsakh earlier this year, thousands of Armenians have been displaced, still grieving their brothers and sons lost in the war. Artsakh cast a dark shadow over a festival which also celebrated the centenary of Armenian cinema and its most famous director, Sergei Parajanov.
Nostalgia for a homeland lost to war mixed with humor and hope. The festival opened with the UK premiere of Michael A. Goorjian’s already-classic Amerikatsi (2022), a dark comedy about repatriation and resilience. It tells the story of Charlie, goofily played by Goorjian himself, an Armenian American returning to Soviet Armenia in 1948.
The first Armenian production short-listed for the Academy Awards, Amerikatsi is a tongue-in-cheek fable about the repatriation of ethnic Armenians after the genocide. Arriving from France, Lebanon, Egypt, and other diasporic hotspots, thousands of Armenians were promised a better life under socialism by Stalin. Instead, they were soon accused of espionage and cosmopolitanism, many ending up in Siberian labor camps.
The grandson of an Armenian genocide survivor, Goorjian visited Armenia together with Kirk Douglas, who starred in his first feature film. The California director began to search for a story he could tell. During the 2018 Velvet Revolution, which saw many young Armenians returning, Goorjian stumbled over the topic of Soviet repatriation. Rather than an overtly political film, he created an absurd fairytale about this dark chapter of history.
Charlie arrives with dreams of belonging and reconnecting with his true Armenian roots. Instead he finds his imaginary homeland under Stalin’s thumb. He lands in prison, accused of being a foreign agent. Among his fellow inmates, he is known as Charlie Chaplin. His life takes a turn when he starts peeping into a prison guard’s apartment from his cell window. The setup is based on a true story from Ukraine told to the director by a friend.
Soon the two worlds clash, representing a rare encounter between the diaspora and Soviet Armenia. Goorjian describes his character as a Holy Fool who embodies both the American spirit of the 1940s and Armenia’s own will to survive. “Charlie is a caricature, a clown,” Goorjian tells me. Like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, he is a profound Holy Fool: “You need someone who is slightly outside of reality to help allow people to see their situation.” Inviting laughter and introspection, Amerikatsi is a crowd-pleaser, yet to my taste a little overloaded with Cold War clichés and folk kitsch.
On the second day, the festival moved from comedy to the harsh reality of life during the Artsakh war. The most impressive work, which just won the Best Film award at the Rome International Documentary Festival, was Shoghakat Vardanyan’s documentary 1489 (2023), a raw, immersive, hard-to-watch debut by a talented auteur. Vardanyan collected intimate glimpses into her family’s uncertainty and grief after the disappearance of the director’s brother, Soghomon, who served as a soldier in the war with Azerbaijan.
The film is anchored in the number 1489, assigned to her brother’s bones when they were eventually found. Vardanyan captures her own ordeal with an unfiltered lens, shaky hands, and tears in her eyes. I was glued to the screen, with a lump in my throat. Vardanyan’s film is a powerful anti-war manifesto, showing how the human cost of war transcends all borders. Her pain is everyone’s pain, a poignant message in a region torn apart by multiple wars.
Vardanyan’s background in classical music shaped the filming. She did not think about what she wanted to do with the material, Vardanyan said on a video call from Rome: “I was trying to understand what the material wants from me. I was the instrument in the editing process.” A rare example of cinematic improvisation, capturing horrific moments as they happened.
Artsakh is also the bleak backdrop of Sareen Hairabedian’s My Sweet Land (2024), a gripping coming-of-age story set in a land that no longer exists. Centered around the eleven-year-old boy Vrej, the film documents the struggle in a small mountain village in Nagorno-Karabakh. Forced to flee his home, Vrej and his family experience the war firsthand.
They eventually return to their half-destroyed village, now populated by snipers, tanks, and landmines. Mountain ranges became trenches, the horizon a frontline. The camera rests on a tree with rotten pomegranates, evoking Armenia’s national symbol. A missile narrowly spared their beehives. The war is still ongoing, the ceasefire peace precarious.
Vrej learns how to march and to use guns and gas masks. The children of Artsakh become soldiers. It is another violent chapter in the slow process of post-Soviet transition: “In 1991, all countries became independent, so all of them wanted to live independently and not submit to Russia. Our map changed,” explains Vrej’s teacher to the kids of Karabakh.
If maps change, so do narratives of belonging. Until its official dissolution this year, the Republic of Artsakh had been unrecognized by most countries, wrestling for independence and recognition. “Now, prove to me that we exist as a country!” the teacher proclaims. Hairabedian’s hero, Vrey replies: “Because we exist.” — “How do we exist?” — “We live here …”
Those villages are no longer populated, after thousands of Armenians had to flee Karabakh following the latest eruption of the conflict in 2023. A year later, Jordan submitted the film to the Academy Award but later withdrew it under pressure from Azerbaijan. Hairabedian’s explosive portrait of a generation violently accustomed to the ways of war is now banned in Jordan.
Themes of national identity, survival, displacement, and the preservation of culture amidst war also permeated a selection of short films by British Armenian filmmakers that rounded out the festival. Those shorts represented “a new wave of creative powers celebrating joy, stoicism and hope—in short, Armenian spirit,” in the words of curator Kira Adibekov and filmmaker Tatevik Ayvazyan, cofounders of the festival.
Naira Muradyan’s funny and wonderfully paced animation Cumulus Clouds (2023) pays homage to Parajanov’s anniversary. The film creates an imaginative cosmos, envisioning the afterlife as a cinematic collage set in the clouds. Inspired by Parajanov’s unfinished The Confession, Muradyan weaves together scenes from her favorite movies.
While Paul Shammasian’s An Angel on Oxford Street (2024) animates ink drawings to portray London’s unhoused, and Gregg Chilingirian’s George (2023) captures the soul-searching of a British-Armenian thirtysomething. Victoria Aleksanyan’s Crossing the Blue (2022) centers on Anoush, brilliantly acted by Armine Anda, who is forcibly deported from Europe to Armenia, which she had left to escape from her abusive husband. Aleksanyan’s film is a disturbingly real portrait of a woman fighting for a better life against all odds.
The program concluded on a dark note, with Garo Berberian’s Taniel (2018), which returned to Armenia’s traumatic primal scene. Berberian’s arthouse neo-noir looks at the Armenian Genocide through the prism of poetry. Taniel retells the last months in the life of the poet Taniel Varoujan before he is murdered on the day of his son’s birth.
Berberian’s film ends with an excerpt from Varoujan’s epic poem Nemesis, which also speaks to contemporary Armenian cinema navigating a world of constant change: “What do we care life is dying, / When the dream is living, / When the dream is immortal.”