Armenia

  • Don Askarian – Komitas (1989)

    1981-1990ArmeniaArthouseDon AskarianDrama

    The film is dedicated to the Armenian monk and genius composer Komitas, and the 2 million victims on his people in Turkey in 1915. The final 20 years of Komitas life were spent in various mental hospitals. The destiny of Komitas? This is the magic beauty of Armenian culture and the abhorrent brutality of Armenian history. A cultural and artistic world that was slaughtered with a curved knife. A humanity that doggedly advances towards an apocalyptic catastrophe, that does not recognize its own original purpose, eradicates its own memory, its final roots.Read More »

  • Arman Manaryan – Heghnar aghbyur AKA Heghnar Spring (1971)

    1971-1980Arman ManaryanArmeniaDrama

    Quote:
    The movie goes back to the beginning of the century. After the death of his unfaithful wife Heghnar, Master Mkrtich builds an unusual spring in her honour. Its water stops flowing as soon as a stranger approaches it. Only Mkrtich, her husband, can drink water from the spring.Read More »

  • Hamlet Hovsepian – Kos AKA Itch (1975)

    Hamlet Hovsepian1971-1980ArmeniaExperimentalVideo Art

    Quote:
    Statement by Hamlet Hovsepian regarding the films:
    “”What have been presented are totally unrelated events (material) at the outset. The relation between them portrays neither pleasant nor unpleasant feelings. To find interest in a place outside man’s attention.”Read More »

  • Hamlet Hovsepian – Untitled (1976)

    1971-1980ArmeniaExperimentalHamlet HovsepianVideo Art

    Quote:
    “Rotation around a rock” / during socialism / the passage of days and decades came to resemble one another, that was our life. Monotonous life chases after us and we are chasing after it.” (Hamlet Hovsepian)Read More »

  • Hamlet Hovsepian – Glukh AKA Head (1975)

    1971-1980ArmeniaExperimentalHamlet HovsepianVideo Art

    Staggeringly simple films: a man itching his back, a man thinking, a man yawning, but like the works of Samuel Beckett, these minute gestures stand in as grand statements of the human condition, akin to the films of Bas Jan Ader and Marcel Broodthaers.Read More »

  • Frunze Dovlatyan – Barev, yes em AKA Hello, That’s Me! (1966)

    1961-1970ArmeniaDramaFrunze DovlatyanRomance

    Synopsis:
    Artyom Manvelyan is a famous physicist and founder of a cosmology laboratory in Aragats. With loyalty and gentleness, he keeps the memories of the World War period, lost love and his friends.Read More »

  • Don Askarian – Ararat: 14 Views (2007)

    2001-2010ArmeniaArthouseDon AskarianDrama

    Synopsis :
    A series of controlled improvisations. They focus on the holy Armenian mountain Ararat that is out of reach in Turkey. The filmmaker looks at his mountain as a poet, a dancer, a painter. And of course, eventually also as a filmmaker.
    Ararat is a holy mountain for Armenians. According to Biblical tradition, Noah saw the first land here again after the Great Flood. So it is difficult for Christian Armenians that the mountain is just over the border in Islamic Turkey. They can only look at it. That is also what Don Askarian does with great dedication and using all his visual inventiveness. Askarian worked for at least five years on this film, which is hard to label. It is not a drama or a documentary and it can’t be put in the tradition of the experimental film, for that he puts up too much resistance to what we now understand as ‘modern’. However, the filmmaker studies his mountain from every conceivable angle, just as the great French painter Cézanne once studied Mont Sainte-Victoire, or like the equally great Japanese print maker Hokusai studied Mount Fuji. Read More »

  • Henrik Malyan – Menq Enq, Mer Sarere AKA We Are, Our Mountains (1969)

    1961-1970ArmeniaComedyDramaHenrik Malyan

    When a petty dispute over a lost sheep gets out of hand, a group of shepherds find their mountain idyll interrupted by the long arm of the law in Henrik Malyan’s cult Soviet satire, adapted from his own work by beloved Armenian author Hrant Matevosyan. Matevosyan’s comic pastorale, alternately absurdist and broad, is brought to life by an all-star cast, including Frunzik Mkrtchyan and Sos Sargsyan. Often cited as the greatest Armenian film ever made, We Are Our Mountains is both charming and cutting in its commentary on the relationship between centre and periphery, state and individual.Read More »

  • Henrik Malyan – Ktor me yerkinq AKA A Piece of Sky AKA A Slap in the Face (1980)

    1971-1980ArmeniaComedyHenrik MalyanRomance

    A Piece of Sky is a 1980 Soviet comedy film directed by Henrik Malyan, based on Vahan Totovents’s story “Light Blue Flowers”. It is a societal critique told through the love story between Torik, a shy outcast janitor, and Anjel, a prostitute.Read More »

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