Strikingly progressive and beautifully crafted, Bagrat Oganesyan’s Autumn Sun tells the story of Aghun (a bravado performance by the director’s own wife, Anahit Gukasyan), a simple woman forced to contend with the banal cruelties of the men who populate her small village: from her father to her husband, in-laws, neighbours, and boss. Filmed in the hometown of screenwriter Hrant Matevosyan, who adapts from his own novel, this is a compassionate portrait of resilience and resignation.Read More »
Beware Masterpiece!
Plot: Sahak Kamsaryan, a teacher from a mountain village, deciphers an inscription carved on an ancient stone and discovers that it dates back a thousand years to his native Lernasar. Determined to celebrate the village’s millennium, Sahak sends invitations to his fellow villagers scattered across the country, hoping to commemorate the occasion with grand festivities. However, news reaches the village that a procession is en route bearing the remains of Sirak Agayan, whose accusations once unjustly harmed many residents of Lernasar. As the funeral procession arrives in Lernasar, it is met by a group of elderly villagers blocking its path.Read More »
Poetic essay about the beginning of life from labor pains and birth and about its symbolic meaning.Read More »
Quote:
In the early 90s, Pelechian made two spiritual films which are among his simplest and most beautiful productions: The End (1992) and Life (1993), Pelechian’s first colour film. In The End, Pelechian transforms footage from a train ride into a metaphor for the shape of a life. Early images of faces on the train give way to landscape, a journey through a black tunnel, and a final emergence into pure white light.Read More »
Armen is an employee of the State Archive, an irrepressible young man, who is not indifferent to the grief, injustice, and meanness of other’s. Armen feels responsible for solving these problems, even though they have no direct bearing on him.Read More »
Quote:
Directed by Vahagn Khachatryan and Aren Malakyan • 2022 • Armenia
A group portrait that captures the hybrid nature of modern-day Armenia, Vahagn Khachatryan and Aren Malakyan’s dreamlike documentary explores the gaps between fantasy and reality in the lives of four characters. Karen is a farmer from the provincial north on a quest to find the perfect wife. Melania is an ageing lift operator in a Yerevan hospital who dreams of becoming an astronaut. Amasia and Sona are two queer teenage girls hiding from the unforgiving world below in their rooftop “fort”. Blending observational documentary with a range of impressionistic techniques, the directorial duo show their homeland to be a country on the brink of painful but necessary transformation.Read More »
Far behind the lines Vahe receives the news of his father’s death. Small boy neither could accept it nor reconcile himself with the new family of his mother who married to another man. The boy prefers to live with his handicapped uncle and every day visits the railway station waiting the trains coming from the frontline.Read More »
At only 14 years old, Aurora lost everything during the horror of the Armenian genocide. Four years later, through luck and extraordinary courage, she escaped to New York, where her story became a media sensation. Starring as herself in Auction of Souls, an early Hollywood blockbuster, Aurora became the face of one of the largest charity campaigns in American history. With a blend of vivid animation, interviews with Aurora herself, and 18 minutes of surviving footage from her lost silent epic, Aurora’s Sunrise revives a forgotten story of survival.Read More »
A film about the great Komitas, one of the victims of the Armenian Genocide, who wasn’t killed, but went crazy and kept silence for 20 years.
The central character is Edgar Novents, a well-known writer and lecturer on the Department of Journalism of the University. He is focused on writing a novel about Rev. Komitas, the great Armenian composer and musicologist, and this provides the bridge between the present and the past. Relying on historical facts, archived documents, psychological hypotheses, Edgar Novents tries to elicit the Paris period of Komitas’ life, to penetrate the enigma of the last years of life of the great son of the Armenian people in the Psychiatric hospital of Villejuif, to bring to light his Great Silence in a gentle and restrained way. To convey fidelity to his novel, The Great Silence, Edgar Novents is trying to share in and understand the sufferings of his literary hero. As a wellbornintellectual, Edgar Novents also is the chronicler of his time, he is always in the focus of modern events, which have been so much shaped by the horrors of the past.Read More »