Programme curated by Jay Weissberg, Mariann Lewinsky and Peter Bagrov

The world has spoken in hushed tones about the armenian genocide, and world cinema has largely kept that silence. Indeed, few films capture this indescribable tragedy, which in truth cannot be fully represented.

Soviet cinema was unable to fill the palpable void. While Hamo Beknazaryan, the father of Armenian cinema, was joined by other Armenian directors in filming the lives of disparate nationalities now united in the USSR, none of them could address the painful events of Armenia’s past due to Soviet suppression of any nationalist agenda it couldn’t control.

In the decades before the first Armenian feature on the genocide, Nahapet (1977), very few films dared address the subject. Three post-war titles (not in the programme) deserve mentioning, beginning with the 1945 full-length documentary Fatherland (Gurgen Balasanyan, Levon Isahakyan and Hrayr Zargaryan), which used archival footage of the genocide to support Stalin’s political plans at the end of WWII (though these were later changed). During the post-Stalinist thaw, Grigor Melik-Avagyan’s feature What’s All the Noise of the River About? (1958) related the story of a refugee from the genocide who tries to return to his homeland on the other side of Mount Ararat.

Among the features of the 1960s, Hello, It’s Me (Frunze Dovlatyan, 1965) received attention thanks to its Cannes screening. Though not about 1915, the drama uses memory as its key element, designed to awaken the nation’s consciousness: says the hero, “recollections are not burdens, but hunger for the past”. The film’s opening shows the ‘chess fever’ from the 1963 world championship, when crowds gathered awaiting the victory of their compatriot Tigran Petrosyan; the protagonist, engaging in a dialogue with his alter ego, summarizes that scene of the masses, calling it the “wounded pride of the nation and a collective expedition to the past – mass remembrance”. Also in 1965 citizens of Soviet Armenia took to the streets demanding a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the genocide – thanks to these protests the Communist leadership agreed to build the Monument to the 1,5 million victims.

The armenian genocide is a bloody page of history that has not been rectified even a century later. Apart from archival images, the program showcases Armenian-produced films including the nation’s first feature Namus (1926), along with Kikos (1931) and Kurdy-Ezidy (1932), representing the early Soviet period. Thanks to increased discussion of national rights in the late Brežnev period a film like Nahapet (1977) with its explicit genocide theme became possible. It was screened in Cannes in 1978 in the section Un certain regard. The Despoiler (1915), in its 1917 reedition linked by rewritten intertitles to the genocide, is included in the section A Hundred Years Ago.

Siranush Galstyan