Vigen Chaldranyan

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 »

Today, Mel Divan is a successful American businessman with a terminal illness. But long ago he was an infamous criminal who escaped from a mental institution in Communist Armenia. With the rise of capitalism, Mel returns to Armenia to make good on a promise to deliver the bounty of his robbery to the widow of a fellow thief. Mel plans on spending only enough time in Armenia to locate the widow. But nostalgia and fate drive him, as the same mental institution from which he escaped is now on the auction block. Mel buys it and finds refuge in running the psychiatric hospital while living among its eclectic residents and helping each in a unique way. Mel will live his final days as a saint provided he can keep one step ahead of the Chief Psychiatrist and a local Mob Boss.Read More »

In April (Armenia 1985), on the 70th anniversary of the genocide, on April 24, 1985, Vigen Chaldranyan stages a conversation between the generations in a mixture of comedy and bitter seriousness. As every year, the veterans talk about the days of the war. But while their sons can no longer hear all this, the grandchildren feel called upon to “solve the Armenian question”.Read More »