Displacement has been a recurring subject in the movies I’ve seen at this year’s True/False Film Festival, an annual event in Columbia, Missouri dedicated to nonfiction filmmaking, and each one of them seems especially urgent with the ongoing genocide in Palestine. It so happens that two Armenian films by women about the Artsakh War and how it has affected the lives and families of those who live there were shown at this year’s festival: There Was, There Was Not by Emily Mkrtichian, and 1489 by Shoghakat Vardanyan. Read my short reviews of those films below.
Armenian folktales don’t start with “Once upon a time.” Instead, they begin “There was, there was not.” This is where director Emily Mkrtichian takes off from in There Was, There Was Not four women from the now-nonexistent Republic of Artsakh against the backdrop of war following a 2020 invasion by the Azerbaijani military. She does this through a mythical framing device complete with literally flipping through a storybook.
The film starts in 2018 with Mkrtichian’s subjects going about their daily lives; Siranush (who worked hard to get her political science degree) runs for office in 2019 on a platform advocating for women’s rights; Sveta supports her three daughters by working in minefields locating and disarming mines left over from the early ’90s war; Sose is a world class martial artist who has represented Artsakh in competitions across the globe; Gayane founded Artsakh’s only women’s center and has dedicated her life to helping women escape abusive situations.
Any one of these stories could be its own film but Mkrtichian handles not only each individual character, but also each character’s work vs. home life balance (there’s a lovely interlude where we peel potatoes with Sose’s charming grandmother) with ease.
She also handles the transition between life in pre-and-post war Artsakh about as smoothly as one can when suddenly explosions could go off at any moment and the distant sounds of gunfire become your soundtrack. Not that there wasn’t some kind of warfare going on before in the regular business of living in a country where women are often treated as second-class citizens Gayane frequently butts heads with a government that labels the informational pamphlets she distributes “pornography.”
That we get to know each woman so well in the first half only serves to make the second half stronger, when they apply their skills in new ways to help their community through crisis. Sose joins the military, becoming the only woman from Artsakh to fight on the front lines (her near single minded militancy feels at odds with the rest of the film’s nuance, but seeing so much of her softness around her family and desire for a family evens it out); Siranush leads protests to raise awareness about what’s happening on her homeland; Gayane opens a new center in Armenia. The result is as hopeful as it is somber yes, technically speaking, Artsakh no longer exists, but its people keep its culture alive through their resilience.
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