I was thinking about a question we recently discussed: What makes a film a film? Having spent the last few days in and around Yerevan’s Cinema House, inside which I saw a good number of GAIFF films (though, as usual, not as many as I would have liked–I’m looking at you, Ever since I Knew Myself, by Maka Gogaladze), the question lingered and made me reflect on the the way I tend to look at and evaluate films. And, looking at two feature debuts in particular—Shoghakat Vardanyan’s 1489 and Farah Kassem’s We Are Inside—it made me wonder to whom this would be of greater consequence: a trainee or a trained filmmaker.
Though not quite the latter (for had circumstances been different—that is, had her brother Soghomon not gone amiss during his mandatory military service—Vardanyan may have never picked up a camera), 1489 approximates perhaps most closely what we may call a work in progress. Back in 2020, on the 7th day of the rekindled Armenian-Azerbaijani war over the breakaway Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), journalist student Shoghakat, at her father’s behest, started filming how her family was processing Soghomon’s absence —"to keep her busy,” we hear her father Kamo say. Starting out as an assignment fueled by familial despair over the Soghomon’s “lost in action” status, Vardanyan’s project of distraction, shot entirely on her phone, soon evolves into a two-year investigation into Soghomon’s whereabouts as well as her family’s coping strategies.
Certain works of creative expression, 1489’s origin story suggests, are occasioned solely by circumstance. For a film so deeply rooted in family tragedy, it can seem cold to overstep this threshold of viscerality, but then again, going past one’s initial emotional reaction to sound out its profundity might be the critic’s most challenging duty and least attainable virtue. So, what makes 1489 a film, and not just filmed material? First and foremost, Vardanyan understands when to prioritize the moment over the overall composition. When she enters her parents’ bedroom to read them the official statement co-signed by Nikol Pashinyan, Ilham Aliyev, and Vladimir Putin that put an end to the war in November 2020, her parents stay in bed, and her camera disappears several times in her father’s nightshirt and hair.
While it would be obvious to point out that in a film so concerned with the ugliness of war there is little use for beauty, it should also be said that beauty, at its most powerful, is often found where we least expect it. One day, we see Kamo catch a sparrow that strayed into a house. Ignoring the premonitory dimension of this sight (in many East-Asian countries, this is a harbinger of fatal news), Vardanyan refrains from charging her already burdensome images with conceptual symbolism, allowing the scene to center wholly on her father’s incessant caressing the little bird’s plumage. In retrospect, however, it is difficult not to understand the ominous nature of this scene; we might see it as Kamo’s farewell to his son.
Much like we may regard Vardanyan’s project as her apprenticeship (into a profession, she stated on stage, she is still uncertain whether to pursue further), We Are Inside by Farah Kassem (for which the Tripoli-born Brussels-based director garnered a Special Mention at this year’s Visions du Réel) can be seen as a film about an apprenticeship, centering on Kassem and her relationship with her father, a writer more than 50 years her senior, whose poetic mastery she seeks to emulate. Like 1489 for Vardanyan, We Are Inside is Kassem’s feature-length debut, yet one does not need trained eyes to spot some differences in experience and technical register between the two. Most of Kassem’s shots are captured indoors–whether directed elsewhere in the flat through door frames, or looking out on the militarized streets of Tripoli through the apartment’s windows.
While it would hardly seem farfetched to see 1489 as a means for Shoghakat Vardanyan to stay sane (not to mention to stay alive), Kassem’s latest project, following in the footsteps of her 2012 acclaimed short film debut My Father Looks Like Abdel Nasser , takes on the shape of connecting tissue binding her closer to her father. Shot over seven years and stretching three hours, We Are Inside renders palpable the passage of time throughout the viewing experience. Which leads us back to our initial question, right? By the way, Al Jazeera bought the rights to aversion of Kassem’s film set to be twice as short as the original. When we next talk in person, consider this letter the Al Jazeera version of what I actually wanted to tell you about these films.