"There is a point during Tamara Stepanyan's My Armenian Phantoms when the documentary cuts to the final scene of the 1980 Soviet film, A Piece of Sky, in which the orphaned lead character, joyfully rides a horse and cart through the town that had long shunned him and the sex worker he married as social outcasts. A flock of birds are then framed gliding through the pristine blue sky above."
"It's a sequence depicting the desire to overcome the forces that seek to limit and constrain which lay at the heart of the director Henrik Malyan's new wave critique. Or, as Malyan says in an unearthed interview that forms part of Stepanyan's archival exploration: It is about the fake and real concept of love and without trying to sound pathetic, our film is about freedom."
"Freedom, and what that entails for both the landlocked republic of Armenia and its large diaspora, has come into sharper focus against this decade's backdrop of war, displacement and conflicts over sovereignty and identity. It is estimated that there are around three times more ethnic Armenians living outside the country than within it a factor that has given rise to the idea of stateless power linked to a region that is increasingly the site of geopolitical tensions between the US, Russia and Iran."
My Armenian Phantoms intercuts archival Armenian films, including the 1980 A Piece of Sky, to evoke aspirations for freedom and social acceptance. The film highlights Henrik Malyan's new wave critique and his claim that cinema examines the fake and real concept of love and freedom. The project situates cinematic memory against recent wars, displacement and contested sovereignty that shape Armenian identity. The Armenian diaspora outnumbers the republic by roughly three to one, producing a concept of stateless power and strategic geopolitical significance. Diasporic and republic experiences of Armenianness are historically distinct and produce divergent cultural outputs.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]