Synopse
Composed mainly of film archives, this film was born of the desire to find my film ancestors, to decode and question the images they shot. I return to Soviet Armenian cinema (1923-1990) with a sense of loss and disappearance that I want to question. How images made by men have influenced the woman filmmaker I am today?
I go back to the images that I bathed in as a child, I close my eyes and remember the stories that my grandfather and father told me from film shootings. My grandfather (Glasevos Harutyunyan) was first assistant director, my father Vigen Stepanyan - who died three years ago- was an actor, my grandmother (Rima Khanzadyan) worked as a sound engineer and supervised dubbing. And then, every Thursday evening, my father, mother, grandmother, I and my brother would get together to watch the weekly film on television.
I will venture into the past, in both its dark and glorious moments, in order to rediscover how Armenia understood itself, thought and dreamed under the Soviet regime. Joseph Stalin ordered the existence of cinema in Armenia in 1923-1924. He wanted to use cinema as a tool of his propaganda. Some did abide indeed, loyal party members , porte parole of J. Stalin . But fortunately some Armenian artists went further to push the iron wall and exist amid the dictatorship. To invent new forms and voices, to surpass the propaganda and still create great films. Some were arrested pardi!
As a filmmaker, I invite myself to take an exploratory voyage with my phantomatic characters.
Am I that lonely girl standing on the sidewalk looking to get the glance of the man in front of her? Am I the poetess who sings poems of love, loss and genocide?
Am I the military who wants to protect the nation?
Or then again, the woman who goes to war living her loved one behind?
Or the widower who wants to go to the far away mountain and create a laboratory?
I want to take the train with my long-lost characters and try to dialog with each of them.
I go back to the images that I bathed in as a child, I close my eyes and remember the stories that my grandfather and father told me from film shootings. My grandfather (Glasevos Harutyunyan) was first assistant director, my father Vigen Stepanyan - who died three years ago- was an actor, my grandmother (Rima Khanzadyan) worked as a sound engineer and supervised dubbing. And then, every Thursday evening, my father, mother, grandmother, I and my brother would get together to watch the weekly film on television.
I will venture into the past, in both its dark and glorious moments, in order to rediscover how Armenia understood itself, thought and dreamed under the Soviet regime. Joseph Stalin ordered the existence of cinema in Armenia in 1923-1924. He wanted to use cinema as a tool of his propaganda. Some did abide indeed, loyal party members , porte parole of J. Stalin . But fortunately some Armenian artists went further to push the iron wall and exist amid the dictatorship. To invent new forms and voices, to surpass the propaganda and still create great films. Some were arrested pardi!
As a filmmaker, I invite myself to take an exploratory voyage with my phantomatic characters.
Am I that lonely girl standing on the sidewalk looking to get the glance of the man in front of her? Am I the poetess who sings poems of love, loss and genocide?
Am I the military who wants to protect the nation?
Or then again, the woman who goes to war living her loved one behind?
Or the widower who wants to go to the far away mountain and create a laboratory?
I want to take the train with my long-lost characters and try to dialog with each of them.
Fotogalerie
