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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Quote:
David Bek (died: 1728) was one of the most prominent figures of the Armenian liberation movement against the Safavid and Ottoman occupying forces. In 1722-25 with direct support from Mkhitar Sparapet, he headed the armed struggle of Syunik (particularly from Kapan) and Artsakh Armenians against Safavids, which led to the slaughter and expulsion of Muslims from the Turkic villages of the Kapan and Meghri districts of Eastern Armenia, that were destroyed by him. In 1726-28 Armenians under the leadership of David Bek fought with Ottoman forces, that were attempting to conquer Transcaucasia.Read More »
Originally, Documentarist was intended as a traditional documentary about a country that has to face challenging problems such as war, unemployment, extreme poverty, mass emigration, alcoholism and crime. Unfortunately, Harutyun Khachatryan did not raise enough state money in order to make the film he wanted to and therefore had to settle for a different project. Thus, he decided on a very unorthodox narrative strategy. By weaving together different styles, such as documentarist observation and docu-drama approach, he shed a new light on the complexities and challenges a director has to face in order to present a multifaceted picture of reality. Read More »
Quote:
Armenia’s leading living filmmaker, Harutyun Khachatryan, chose his nation’s 19th century poet, Ashugh Jivani, as his new film’s central spirit. This is hardly accidental, for nothing here is prosaic. Here is a dazzling, alternative vision of a cinema that is essentially poetic, metaphorical and allusive. A work of tactile sensuality, it nominally depicts the step-by-step creation of a monumental statue of the poet that ends up traveling on the back of a truck through the Armenian countryside. From this Khachatryan conjures a transcendental cinematic experience, employing a sublime fusion of sound, image and music to evoke the soul of the director’s beloved country and its people.Read More »
Story of a strong-willed man, Nahapet, who lost his family during the 1915 Genocide! is an eternal story of resurrection.
From imdb
Storyline
Nahapet (meaning also patriarch in Armenian) has lost all his family and intimates, his house and properties during the 1915 Genocide. Self-absorbed and reticent, he reminds a withered tree. Same is with the village on the slops of Aragatz mountain where he finds shelter – half-destroyed houses, cowed faces, sun-scorched rocky earth. Could Nahapet find inner strength to build a new house, start a new family, revive the things cast away by the destiny. Eternal story of resurrection, so much symbolic for Armenian nation’s history. Written by ArtakRead More »