Discoveries from Armenia World Cinema

Armenian short film by Lilit Umedyan

After his family is slain by a Turkish nationalist, saved by a miracle, the hero seeks revenge, tracking down the killer more than 20 years later.

Vardan has grown up, yet his little brother continues his pranks. Meanwhile, a "savage" grandmother appears in the neighborhood, creating a lot of trouble for their oligarch father.

The love for the homeland and the love he found in Armenia forces a young Armenian living thousands of kilometers away from his homeland to sacrifice himself and risk his life to save the members of his Syrian Armenian family from the captivity of Islamic terrorists.

Society creates stereotypes, and people begin to obey them regardless of their will. The same society often decides that those who are not like the majority have no place in the same world. Nunik is a girl living in a small corner of this big world who is trying to change the world. Nunik brings his brother with autism to the guests at his older sister's wedding, ignoring his parents' ban. perhaps without realizing it deeply, but already with the inner conviction that by rejecting what is different from us, we reject nature and God.:

Short film honoring Sergey Parajanov's Carmen puppets.

Each time as Davit enters a state of daydream he finds harder and harder to socialize with his peers.

A film about military friends, one of whom steps on a landmine.

Journalist Henry Gasparyan shoots and publishes scandalous materials about the city's oligarchs. During the filming of another scandalous material about oligarch Gabriel Sedrakyan, two bodyguards approach him and kidnap. Henry's friends Arsen and Felix find out (using the geolocation of Henry's phone) that he is being taken to the forest. So Arsen and Felix go into the forest to rescue their friend and find out who is behind the kidnapping. In the forest, Arsen and Felix get into various dangerous situations, meet strange people, try to understand where Henry is kept. These adventures eventually take them to a destination they never imagined of.

Carabina is a gay artist, travesty, and sex worker married to Hasmik, a heterosexual lawyer. Now that they are parents. They now have to face a dilemma: Is the kid going to grow up or not in Armenia where 93% of the population is against and hostile to homosexuality? In his performance, Carabina struggles as a gay travesty since his childhood. His show follows his relationship with Hasmik, which permits us to distinguish the Carabina from the show and the real Carabina, a funny personality, eccentric, and full of drama. The show and the personal life create a parallel between the experience that Caribina creates during his show and the tragic homophobic reality he lives in. Witch could be considered as a “performance” of society. Meanwhile, Hasmik is working as a lawyer. in her cabinet and in court. She defends the rights of the LGBT community. We distinguish here Hasmik as a hard worker, a lawyer, and as a loving wife and mother at home.

A successful businessman with a terminal illness returns to Armenia and buys a mental institution.

Susanna is the director of the Art School of Togh, a village occupied during the 2020 war opposing Armenia to Azerbaijan. Supported by the faculty, she tries to bring education back in the midst of a fragile peace.

The reign of the Armenian king Artavazd Il coincided with the period of fierce Roman-Parthian wars, in which Greater Armenia always took a direct part. Greek and Roman historians called Armenia the third power in the world, and its king Artavazd Il one of the most influential and authoritative rulers of his era. This was the era of great personalities Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Mark Antony, who became part of the great policy of the Armenian king Artavazd II.

A funny and sad story about how two friends accidentally smashed a bust of Stalin and what happened next.

Aghasik is a very energetic and joyful taxi driver, whose life changes when the bride running from her own wedding gets into his car.

Only one soldier returns to the mountainous village after the war just to find that all the women there became widows.

Armenian priest Komitas, who achieves European fame as a singer and songwriter, concomitantly suffers the disasters of the early 20th century: war and genocide which drive him insane.

For his first feature-length documentary, Bek-Nazarian uses both archival footage and re-enacted scenes to create a historical and poetic fresco about the transformation of the Nairi province into a flourishing Soviet republic.

The main character is dating three completely different girls at the same time. But what will happen to him when the girls find out about the lie?

4 years old Armenian girl Ziazan one day decides to go on an adventure. She will sneak in from Armenia to Turkey inside her uncle's luggage. Will she be able to go over the closed borders between 2 countries and realize her adventure?

The film is about the psychological experiences of a young musician who is waiting for his verdict in the night of political chaos.

“The Home That Is Me” is an animated film that tells the story of searching for a home, not in a geographical sense, but in terms of internal stability and self-sufficiency. The film is born from the director’s personal experience, forced to leave his homeland due to war and witnessing both physical and spiritual destruction.The boy must save himself from the invasion of flies, but the house that he built did not save him, and the people he tried to trust turned out to be an even greater danger. now the hero has to understand where in this world there is a safe place.

Eight-year-old Veronica and six-year-old Anya met recently, but have already become best friends. Anya lives in a luxurious mansion, while Veronica lives in an old dilapidated house. Anya invites her friend to her birthday party, but betrays her there. A simple story about a children's party turns into an existential parable about the search for forgiveness.

Armenia and Azerbaijan are engaged in a multi-secular conflict. A war breaks out again. In Stepanakert, capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, men are at the front, women hide in the cellars, director Silva Khnkanosian sets out to find them and keeps a logbook. Life is organized under the bombs; women follow the war on the radio or checking their phones. No one sees defeat as an option. Yet after 44 days of battles, radio announces the capitulation of Armenia. We must leave.

Set in a liminal desert space, The Road (Ճանապարհ) contemplates how it feels to be in the world at this moment through overlapping narratives of isolation and connection. The stories of five sets of characters, suspended in time and space, unfold and collide on the very same road, set against a soundtrack by the Armenian-Australian jazz band, Zela Margossian Quintet. “Each of the five narratives in our work are centred around decisive moments in people’s lives; from this point forward these characters will be forever changed as they undergo some sort of renewal, redemption or transcendence,” says director Charlotte Mungomery. “We were also interested in the conceptual and almost existential notion of a road and humanity’s attempt to control the uncontrollable and tame the untameable.”

Zako - was the name German soldiers gave to the Soviet Armenian painter, Sargis Mangasaryan. Thanks to his creative gifts, Zako prevailed and survived the hell of WWII military camps.Zako endured by drawing portraits of his tormentors. He tried to escape several times, but each time landed in another harsher camp. After the war, he risked exile to Siberia, as he was a prisoner of war, he was considered a traitor to the Soviet Union. He created several huge portraits of Stalin to earn him passage home to Soviet Armenia.Some years later, in 1956, Zako visits the famous Picasso exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow with his friends. He realized how undeveloped his portrait drawings had remained all those years. Although he was fighting for his physical freedom throughout, his artistic evolution was stunted within the system.

The time of major social changes and social upheavals inevitably entails a chain of personal dramas and tragedies. The hero of the film is an actor and director, a Yerevan resident, for whom the priority of the Spirit over the physical "I" is an axiom. Life without serving art, reduced to a struggle for survival, is unacceptable to him.

Anoush, an emigrant, who fled post-soviet Armenia from her abusive husband, is facing eventual deportation years later…

Jeanette and Anette are twin sisters, granddaughters of the famous clairvoyant Arus from the remote Armenian village of Matzarut. Years ago, Jeanette left the village, and Annette stayed with her grandmother. The grandmother dies, passing her grace to one of her granddaughters. Due to fate, the sisters have to change places... And life will decide whether we are the hostages of our luck or the owners.

The hero, who came from the village to the city, accidentally meets an old friend. Excited about that meeting they visit all their villagers who already live in the city.

The filmmaker envisions what life would have been like if her parents never left their country of origin. The haunting imagery and disjointed narration (in Amharic, left un-translated) create a portrait of the place her mother and father called home.

a humorous film about how agents of foreign intelligence services attempt to kidnap and seize a drug discovered by Armenians against AIDS, and how the Armenian intelligence agencies fight against them…

Cagliostro, who possessed the secrets of immortality, returns home a hundred years after his official death, where he was supposed to find his lost love, the "ring". Meeting his youth in a forgotten castle and discovering the loss of love, he departs into the depths of the ages, rejecting any further involvement with Satan.

A story of several film school students during summer workshop in Yerevan. A journey that begins as a student trip turns into a search for love, friendship and magic.

The main characters of Hasmik and Jacques spend their honeymoon in the family house in Dilijan, but the former admirer of the young woman Gor, who hanged himself in a madhouse, unable to withstand the loss of his beloved, is a ghost and does not give the newlyweds peace.

In 1977 Soviet Armenia, two brothers, Nikolay and Felix Kalachyan, pulled off the most daring bank heist in USSR history, stealing 1.5 million rubles from the State Bank in Yerevan using nothing but a children's umbrella. Swift and calculated, they couldn't escape the long arm of the Soviet state. The KGB closed in, the trial was secret, and the sentence was death. A true story buried for decades, until the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist.

A lonely teacher at a college for deaf and dumb children started to hear a strange pitched noise that breaks the windows.

Having received a serious injury as a result of a car accident, Nazik Avdalyan dropped out of the big sport for 7 years, then came back and, despite the distrust of others and inhuman bodily pains, became a double European champion.

The film tells about the flight of the poetic mind, which can satiate the poet and throw him from the sky to the bitter reality.

The film is a cinematic love-letter to Reichshoffen, a small, modest town in Alsace, and its residents.

The courier Aziz needs money to save his wife. She is in a hospital clinging to life. Aziz has to make a deal with the devil getting money for her

After having two daughters, the father of the family dreams of having a son. And here, his wife gets pregnant...

90s of the 20th century. The USSR Empire is collapsed. It left a whole generation helpless and lost. Arsen, set free from military imprisonment, suffers a double tragedy: on the culmination of the USSR collapse he lost the most important people in his life — his parents and the friend. How to live henceforth if there are no light drops both in the personal and public life? Or maybe there are.

The worst group of the college is being disbanded. The students of the group, not accepting the decision, decide to participate in the annual competition organized by the Student Council to receive the title of best group and restore the reputation and the old group.

Arev, a 19-year-old student, visits her family during vacation. One morning, her father suddenly disappears without a word. As the family begins blaming one another, Arev sets out on her bicycle, retracing her father's usual paths through fields and mountains. Along the way, she reflects on her father's pain, the tense family dynamics, and her own growing sense of loneliness. The question haunts her: “Dad, do you still love me?” Her search for her father becomes a deeper journey to understand fatherhood and human connection. Along the way, she discovers three signs that give her hope he may return.

A failed actor now entertaining kids and seeks his fate through endless castings and auditions. Continuous setbacks pushed him into motivational media. All of a sudden he accomplished a "feat".

The study of existential drunkenness turns into an in-depth observation of dozens of people who, consciously or in a state of altered consciousness, try to find the relationship between trauma, addiction and hope for salvation.

A schoolgirl struggles with choosing a profession due to the uncertainty and the pressure from relatives.

Pianist Elena, who lives with her daughter, accidentally finds out that the girl has lied to her and dropped out of Conservatory. Having controlled her daughter's life her entire life, Elena once again tries to stop her from making this decision.

Based on Zorayr Khalapyan's novel of the same name, a medical graduate is appointed as a doctor to a village, never losing his human image in spite of Stalinist repression.

A scientist examines the globe under a microscope. A rocket taking off from the Earth, breaking through the lens of a microscope, penetrates the scientist’s skull.

The film is about a woman’s prison and shows how creativity transforms people and gives them strength.

The boy from Erevan is witnessing the ritualistic sacrifice (matakh) for the first time. Will he be able to overcome the death of the animal?

A phone call that puts the hero in front of a choice between life and death:

Life in Gyumri during the Karabakh war is full of hope and disappointment. Men work for their living, women wait for the return of their husbands and sons, efforts are topped by coming victory.

In the aftermath of a recent genocide, Haïg, a young survivor is chosen to father a new generation of his people and ensure the survival of his endangered Armenian race, while sacrificing his personal freedom.