I arrived in Yerevan early on Sunday and received that warm Armenian welcome in the form of a bucket full of cold water splashed on me. Just as that taste of the Vardavar festival custom was refreshing, so have my viewings at the Golden Apricot International Film Festival. Watching documentary offerings from the region has reminded me how pressing political issues in one place can seldom be truly felt, understood, or even simply known on the other side of the globe even in our hyperconnected era.
Seeing these films here in Armenia, whose people have suffered from occupation, war, and genocide that continue to this day, only seems to add more to their urgency and potency. For me, this was particularly true for Shoghakat Vardanyan’s debut feature documentary, 1489. The winner of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) top prize was warmly embraced, in applause and tears, during its premiere in the fully-packed Grand Hall of the Cinema House, the largest in Armenia. When her 21-year-old brother Soghomon goes missing one week into the Second Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) War between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020, Vardanyan picks up her phone and starts recording herself and her parents.
The war only lasted 44 days, but she would go on filming for two years to find out what happened to her brother, assigned the titular number in the army registry for missing personnel. In their heartrending sincerity, these phone recordings seem more unvarnished than unpolished. A salient example is the low-light grainy opening scene that sees Vardanyan’s father sitting at a kitchen table, weary and resigned, remarking on how a person should have to live, not die, for their country. This sense of utter desperation pervades the film. Vardanyan’s mother busies herself with sewing pillowcases for soldiers on the frontline, perhaps with the hope that one would find its way to her son, while her father restlessly paces around their living room and his sculpting studio. “Is it really that difficult to make a single call?” he asks aloud. As the burden of uncertainty becomes increasingly heavier, a crack appears in the state of despair through which a feeling of dread starts to seep through. Sometimes this happens unconsciously, as when Vardanyan points out to her father that he has started using the past tense to talk about Soghomon.
Another documentary I watched that homes in on the familial within the context of the national is the nearly three-hour-long regional competition entry, We Are Inside. Lebanese filmmaker Farah Kassem returns to her native Tripoli to accompany her ailing father Mustapha and document their time together. Whereas the interesting linguistic aspect of 1489—the several paragraphs of text that bookend it and offer context on both the war and the filming appear only in English—are non-diegetic, language is at the center of We Are Inside. Kassem turns to poetry, hoping to find a common tongue with her poet father that would bring them closer together. Mustapha, an ardent defender of the Arabic literary language, initially rejects her efforts, telling her to go back behind the camera, but her prose poetry eventually finds favor with his all-male poetry club members.
Great personal films do not necessarily grow into intimate ones, but I am happy to report that We Are Inside manages to be both, much of it thanks to its cinematography and poetic visual metaphors. Kassem’s camerawork oscillates between barebones home movie setup to more cinematic visuals, but what remains constant throughout is her well-thought-out framing, particularly the shots of her unaware father in their apartment. The film is shot almost entirely indoors, while the outside world–where vigilant soldiers stand on street corners–is observed in brief glances through windows. The 4:3 aspect ratio captures the enclosedness but also the intimate feeling of their daily interactions, which range from discussing the future of the country to haggling with a street vendor. Pigeons that nest on Kassem’s windowsill and their eggs (later squabs) become a poetic motif as well as a visual metaphor for the father-daughter relationship and the country’s future as the 17 October Protests burst out across Lebanon. However, this overtly political part evaporates somewhat inconclusively, emerging as it does all of a sudden only in the film’s last third.
I found it especially intriguing that these two documentaries are particularly self-conscious of their filming processes and their goals. Each wants to preserve their memories of loved ones while documenting the painful uncertain histories of their respective nations. Vardanyan asks her father to repeat his words for the camera and Kassem chats with Mustapha about why they’re making the film. In a sense, each filmmaker attempts to become their subject. Vardanyan shaves her head and stands in front of her brother’s army portrait, perhaps a hopeful attempt to lessen her and her parents’ loss. Kassem ends her film by juxtaposing two shots: her father standing by the window and, moments later, she herself in the same position. Watching these two affecting works has left me thinking that, much as the departed can live on in films, they also do so in ourselves.