Discoveries from Armenia World Cinema

This concert is about adapting to a new reality, about emigration and a little bit about tits and pussy.

A chamber opera based on Aram Pachyan's eponymous book.

While the post-war country is torn apart by the atmosphere of pessimism and suspense, 25-year-old Satenik has to watch videos of tortured war captives to help find soldiers gone missing during the war. Amongst them is Satenik’s brother.

While selling goods in the train carriage, Mkhitar notices his peer, Karen, who has his feet on the front seat and his head hanging on the textbook. Silently obeying Mkhitar's remark, Karen lowers his legs and turns his back. Mkhitar, tries various methods to contact the stranger. Karen, with the bag hanging around his neck, shouts in the train carriages and tries to sell Mkhitar's goods, while Mkhitar is deep in his thoughts: is he thinking about the chess problem or life in general?

Adapted from Michael Lazar Issa’s story of the same name (ܗܘ ܬܪܥܢ ܚܠܝܩܐ – Aw Tar’an Khleeqa), the film tells the tragic story of Ester and Eshay, a young couple who elope only for Ester to become the victim of an honour killing. The film is an elegy on the Assyrian homeland, shaped by repeated genocide, intergenerational trauma and displacement. It captures the beauty of tradition and ritual, without shying from a critique of the patriarchal values embedded in the culture. Our Locked Door also highlights the tenacity of the Assyrian diaspora, being made on a small budget and relying on the goodwill of the communities in Australia and Armenia where it was filmed.

The kid is trying to avoid going to the kindergarten, because at home, as he thinks, it is a lot more fun and enjoyable with the beloved cat. His parents and grandmother have to catch the boy and run after him, tearing him off the curtains and dressing the careless child. But they will still deliver him to the garden, and it is still more interesting there than at home.

In an Armenian village, five women - who are daughters, mothers and grandmothers - from several generations debate together about life and war while they prepare lavash the Armenian traditional bread.

Seven convicts run away from a penal colony to a town destroyed by an earthquake in search of their relatives. An old captain goes after them with a two-day liberty order for each of them. But liberty in the destroyed world, permeated with the stench of corpses and perpetuities is no longer necessary. The film is about the on-going catastrophe of the human soul.

After Armenia's defeat in the Karabakh war, Armenia, Russia and Azerbaijan sign an agreement in which Armenia undertakes to surrender five territories adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh. People who live there must leave their homes before a certain date. A few days before the end of the term, a group of Armenian volunteers, including archaeologists, visits these places to take out Armenian Christian shrines, medieval cross stones, some of the most significant values in Armenian culture. Otherwise, the cross-stones may be destroyed by the Azerbaijanis. On the way, they meet a local resident who was left alone, with things, without transport. Our volunteers have a choice, either to save the cross-stones, or this woman, because there is not enough space in the car for everything at once...

‘Sweeping Yerevan’ is the warm portrait of Marina, a woman who travels 40 km every night to sweep the streets of Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, while dodging cars and putting her life at risk, in order to provide for her blind husband, live-in mother-in-law, unemployed son, and two young children. By day, she mends clothes for clients and works as a janitor at the local music school to cover all of her family’s expenses. With few options for her generation since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the closure of factories, Marina nurtures education and musical skills in her children, hoping that they will have a different future from her own.

It is the past that determines the future of Armenia, says a woman right at the beginning of the film. Much of what is said later in the film proves her right.

Navigating three types of images, shot in three different periods, the film explores the poetics of haunting through compositions of images that create an entanglement between the past and the present. An intimate but detached voice, a little stoic even, speaking of countless losses. The repeated affirmation of belonging to a place that is no longer.

A smile travels through the world of sadness, transformed by emotions and thoughts but a kiss of love brings it back home.

Wordless animated fim from Robert Sahakyants

In 1988, Gyumri, the second largest city of Armenia, was destroyed by a terrible earthquake. Decades later, people are still recovering from the tragedy. Once a lively city, it is nowadays a heap of debris. Its inhabitants try to cope with the harsh reality by sharing haunting memories of the Soviet era. Thus, the days go by recalling stories and people long gone. The filmmaker captures a world suspended on the threshold of different eras, while somehow lingering in a space out of time. An ageless and intimate feeling ties together the precisely framed and edited images of people trying with great strength to defend what is left of their dignity.

Sintayehu Tesale is an Ethiopian carpenter. But not only. He is an inspiring person; one of those who leave a mark on you when you meet him. He is persevering, he is positive, he boosts your strength, he encourages you to stand up. He is, in summary, a motivational person. Maybe, part of this strength comes from his own struggles, from his own experience, from the fact that he is one of the few carpenters in the world who does not use his hands, but his feet, due to an undiagnosed disability. This is the story of Sintayehu, the story of his life.

The movie Is set in a fairytale village, one lost to old time. This town is on the border between Portugal and Spain. People have lived here for centuries. During the day not much is happening. People who I portrayed are continuously doing the same things. Following the same routine of waiting next to the church, going to the bar for a coffee. But unlike other towns the energy of this village is divided into two parts. As the light starts to settle and darkness takes over the village all of a sudden the mystery and magic that did not exist during the day, knocks on the door of this town. And the viewer finds out that in this village the night belongs to mystery.

Once the poor, foolish man decides to go to the wise man and ask for advice. He meets the wolf and the beautiful girl on the road who also want some advice of the wise man.

Two friends find a realtor's phone number, call him and buy the house he showed them, but it turns out the house is haunted.

A story of one painter, bringing beauty onto the gray garages on Yerevan, leaving his kind trace.

Hero lives in a semi-basement floor in a comfort zone, eating and enjoying leisure activities at the same time daily, and is oblivious to outside world, even to the misfortune occurred before his eyes. The insensibility lasts until his quiet life is challenged.

The film is about the decline of patriarchal values, the distortion of human connections, and a foresight into the fading warmth of neighborliness and kinship.

The son of the protagonist dies in a car accident and the offender is acquitted by the court. Then the father decides to take revenge on his son's killer.

Santa Claus receives a letter from a rich boy and decides to fulfill his wish. But to do so, the good old man will have to face the security guards of the boy's luxurious mansion.

Amateur Movie

A poor girl who receives a divine gift.

A poor girl who receives a divine gift.

During the Armenian Genocide of 1915, two women found a large ancient Armenian manuscript. They divided it into two parts, each taking one of them.

A narrative short film.

A messy story begins with an innocent breakfast, which then turns into a seven-story lie, which, fortunately, does not have serious consequences.

Elegy in Light, shot on super 8mm film at the funeral of Catholicos Vazgen I, Supreme Patriarch of All Armenians, depicts an ancient and rarely seen rite of the Armenian Church with the music of monastic ritual chant and minimalist sound design: an ethnographic art film described by one viewer as "a psychedelic trip into medieval times." The film is an impressionistic meditation on death, life and the fragmentary way we remember the past. The medium of 8mm film, with its unique visual characteristics, becomes a metaphor for memory and for the soul itself; a cinematic memorial made from the substances of time and light.

Post-Diy is directed at the circumstances surrounding the bombing attack of the queer bar in Yerevan called ‘DIY.’ It aims to produce both a visual and a verbal language that constructs and narrates life after the tragic event that took place on May 8, 2012. If the attack on DIY can be read as an act to silence and establish exclusionary societal norms by eradicating what is perceived as transgressive, then this video documents the fact that life goes on no matter what. It questions the desire to establish uniformity and totalitarianism in the post‐independent phase of the Armenian Republic and seeks out the beauty residing in a dissident relationship between two women.

Late at night in a police station in Yerevan, Armenia, officers exchange crude jokes and tease a new recruit who seems uneasy about someone waiting in the next room.

With sunlight quickly fading on the horizon, a student goes on a fantastic journey contemplating the importance of happiness and budding friendships versus their studies.

"Silence IV" is an audio-visual component of the very short untitled poem written above.

This is a story about a survivor in a post-apocalyptic world who lost his perception of reality and tries to distinguish the real world from the unreal.

Having done time in prison for robbery, the protagonist returns home. A lot of things changed during the time of his absence: his wife lost all motivation to live and leads the life of a drunk, their son was taken into a disciplinary orphanage. The protagonist tries to get his family back together, but will he be able to do it, after the great mistakes he made in his life?

From «Les affaires publiques» to «L’ Argent». The first film of Robert Bresson (“Les Affaires publiques”) reminds us of classic silent comedies with visual tricks and falls that aim to make the audience laugh. Bresson never shot a comedy again. However, he kept portraying falling people and objects – now intending to provoke other feelings and thoughts.

Reflecting growing up in Ethiopia in the 1980s' part of a group show titled: "Feedback: Art, Africa and the Eighties"

This is a short film featuring a district in Yerevan, Armenia, where the legacy of the Soviet Union still occupies the minds and daily lives of the residents living in these huge unfinished monolithic structures built to write the letters CCCP.

The patriotic story of the five-year resistance movement from the Italian aggression.

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