While the new crop of Armenian short films often concern themselves with the end of the world and other apocalyptic scenario’s, there’s also good news: the selected films in the Apricot Stone Short Film Competition are strong examples of an urgent and vibrant national cinema.
“The world is ours, the world is ours!” is what a couple of Los Angeles-based Armenian men exclaim in song and dance, while celebrating the launch of an Armenian satellite into orbit. “Every Armenian in the world is the owner of the world,” they bellow in Arsen Azatyan’s The World Is Ours (Her Story). But what world even is this? This short based on true events actually depicts the tribulations of Lusine, a seventeen year old pregnant girl who endures her patriarchal family until the bloody end.
There’s little reason to celebrate the state of the world if you take this years’ curated films in the Apricot Stone Short Film Competition as a whole. “I just knew the world was ending,” speaks a deceased father in a dreamlike fugue to his daughter in Conversations and Dreams by Melanya Hamasyan, a highly experimental film that traces the ghastly connections between past and present existential angst. Maybe that’s why so many of the short films here are about disappearance, erasure, loneliness and ennui: the ghosts of the past haven’t been released, while new trauma relentlessly accumulates.
Take Forgive me, mother by Arthur Nazaretian: a post-apocalyptic film about life after invasion that evokes the forced displacement of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War and channels the eradication of Armenians in the 1915 genocide. Just like Gor Arushanyan’s more ‘realistic’ Motherland, this is the story of a man who is faced with the painful dilemma to abandon his mother and basically leave her to die in a zone of conflict. Daddy, you still love me, don't you? by Marina Soloyan is an inversion of this theme — here a father abandons his daughter and leaves her exploring the scarred psyche of her family composition. Somewhat similarly, Arshile Egoyan’s Before they Joined Us depicts how, on the precipice of the 1975 war in Lebanon, two sisters are shipped off by their parents to Montreal, where they are housed by their aunt, a religious zealot who is anticipating a Christian Armageddon.
If the world is burning, is escape even an option? Bahar Pars’ Just Like a Boy shows how an Iranian girl flees her motherland and strands in Afghanistan, where she has to pass as a boy to protect herself from harm. The repression of her identity simply undergoes a cosmetic transformation in a perpetual quest for freedom. An unexpected relationship with a young man only reinforces how she is now imprisoned even deeper within the condiments of her own body. Perhaps all of this explains the relentless ennui of Pathologic, a haunting experimental short by Arsen Sarkisyan, mostly shot in black and white, that serves as a kind of metaphysical horror on the uncanny feeling of being stuck in a time and a place. It’s a grim film with striking imagery — the most chilling one a lifelike puppet dangling from the ceiling with a noose strung around her neck.
Are you depressed yet? Perhaps it’s time for a sliver of hope, which comes to us in the form of Snake Soup, an impressive animation short by Zack Demirtshyan about a soldier on his way to the battlefield, who uses his vivid mind to conjure a cosmic ode to the power of imagination. And then we have Fibers by Anna Grigorian, a tender documentary about the endurance of women who shelter from the Azeri aggression in Artsakh. This is a tribute to the gentle resilience of people, who through the communal experience of cooking and baking transform a grim reality into something that reminds us of the beauty that resides in the human spirit. This is perhaps best embodied in Dora, the elderly protagonist of Gohar Sargsyan’s Dora's Yellow Shoes, an 84 year old survivor of wars who has never lost her spirit. Patiently awaiting the moment her time to leave this mortal coil, Dora has already prepared her costume for her inevitable, yet peaceful departure. Because what else can we do but show our best side when the time has come to enter our coffin? It’s a strangely comforting notion in the face of all these painfully urgent narratives.
Hugo Emmerzael
Apricot Stone films block 1 screened at 17-7 17:30 and block 2 at 21:30 at House of Cinema Grand Hall.
“The world is ours, the world is ours!” is what a couple of Los Angeles-based Armenian men exclaim in song and dance, while celebrating the launch of an Armenian satellite into orbit. “Every Armenian in the world is the owner of the world,” they bellow in Arsen Azatyan’s The World Is Ours (Her Story). But what world even is this? This short based on true events actually depicts the tribulations of Lusine, a seventeen year old pregnant girl who endures her patriarchal family until the bloody end.
There’s little reason to celebrate the state of the world if you take this years’ curated films in the Apricot Stone Short Film Competition as a whole. “I just knew the world was ending,” speaks a deceased father in a dreamlike fugue to his daughter in Conversations and Dreams by Melanya Hamasyan, a highly experimental film that traces the ghastly connections between past and present existential angst. Maybe that’s why so many of the short films here are about disappearance, erasure, loneliness and ennui: the ghosts of the past haven’t been released, while new trauma relentlessly accumulates.
Take Forgive me, mother by Arthur Nazaretian: a post-apocalyptic film about life after invasion that evokes the forced displacement of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War and channels the eradication of Armenians in the 1915 genocide. Just like Gor Arushanyan’s more ‘realistic’ Motherland, this is the story of a man who is faced with the painful dilemma to abandon his mother and basically leave her to die in a zone of conflict. Daddy, you still love me, don't you? by Marina Soloyan is an inversion of this theme — here a father abandons his daughter and leaves her exploring the scarred psyche of her family composition. Somewhat similarly, Arshile Egoyan’s Before they Joined Us depicts how, on the precipice of the 1975 war in Lebanon, two sisters are shipped off by their parents to Montreal, where they are housed by their aunt, a religious zealot who is anticipating a Christian Armageddon.
If the world is burning, is escape even an option? Bahar Pars’ Just Like a Boy shows how an Iranian girl flees her motherland and strands in Afghanistan, where she has to pass as a boy to protect herself from harm. The repression of her identity simply undergoes a cosmetic transformation in a perpetual quest for freedom. An unexpected relationship with a young man only reinforces how she is now imprisoned even deeper within the condiments of her own body. Perhaps all of this explains the relentless ennui of Pathologic, a haunting experimental short by Arsen Sarkisyan, mostly shot in black and white, that serves as a kind of metaphysical horror on the uncanny feeling of being stuck in a time and a place. It’s a grim film with striking imagery — the most chilling one a lifelike puppet dangling from the ceiling with a noose strung around her neck.
Are you depressed yet? Perhaps it’s time for a sliver of hope, which comes to us in the form of Snake Soup, an impressive animation short by Zack Demirtshyan about a soldier on his way to the battlefield, who uses his vivid mind to conjure a cosmic ode to the power of imagination. And then we have Fibers by Anna Grigorian, a tender documentary about the endurance of women who shelter from the Azeri aggression in Artsakh. This is a tribute to the gentle resilience of people, who through the communal experience of cooking and baking transform a grim reality into something that reminds us of the beauty that resides in the human spirit. This is perhaps best embodied in Dora, the elderly protagonist of Gohar Sargsyan’s Dora's Yellow Shoes, an 84 year old survivor of wars who has never lost her spirit. Patiently awaiting the moment her time to leave this mortal coil, Dora has already prepared her costume for her inevitable, yet peaceful departure. Because what else can we do but show our best side when the time has come to enter our coffin? It’s a strangely comforting notion in the face of all these painfully urgent narratives.
Hugo Emmerzael
Apricot Stone films block 1 screened at 17-7 17:30 and block 2 at 21:30 at House of Cinema Grand Hall.