Yerevan Dispatch. 2.

Although the Golden Apricot International Film Festival focuses on the international component of its program, the unique element of the event that marked its fifth year in Yerevan was its national focus. Where else would you see documentaries about Armenians and Jews facing the Nazis in the city of Kharkov during World War II? The Germans, hunting down victims through racial profiling, were often convinced that Armenians were actually Jews, whom they had been ordered to exterminate. The film Echoes from the Past looks at one case of Armenians who hid an escaped Jewish prisoner. Another doc, 1937 by Nora Martirosyan, examined the Stalinist purges in Armenia in the 1930s, in the shadow of Georgia, Stalin's homeland, by focusing on the fate of one political dissident.

All this in Yerevan, a city that has only two functioning cinemas, in a country that makes one to two feature films a year, plus documentaries. Yet this picture could change. On the boards are Border, an observation of Armenia's relations during the war of the early 1990s with its neighbor and enemy, Azerbaijan, from the perspective of a she-buffalo. Another title is Chnchik, a drama about an "honor killing" of a pregnant unmarried Armenian girl by her parents. Should Chnchik ever be completed and released, its subject may be controversial in a country that wants to join the community of nations; on the other hand, honor killings have been a subject on the Armenian screen since films were first made there.

This meager production will be amplified with the Armenian-language remake of the 1959 classic, Song of the First Love, financed by the Central Partnership, the huge distribution firm in Moscow which is run by Armenians. Among many other films, the Central Partnership is distributing Mermaid (winner of the international feature prize at Sundance 2008), the Russian feature by Anna Melikyan which will be distributed by IFC in the US. The American filmmaker Braden King is preparing the $2 million film Here, which he calls "landscape-obsessed road movie that chronicles the relationship between an American mapmaker and an expatriate art photographer who impulsively decide to travel together into uncharted foreign territory."

Add to that mix films by diaspora Armenians like Atom Egoyan, Eric Nazarian (director of The Blue Hour, which played at the GAIFF), Hank Saroyan (nephew of the Armenian-American writer William Saroyan, whose centennial is this year) and Carla Garapedian (director of Screamers, the documentary about the Armenian Genocide with the band System of a Down), and you have rumblings of a critical mass.

Yet even Hollywood at its height wouldn't be able to measure up to the sort of power ascribed to Armenian cinema by some Turkish writers making claims for the world mission and conspiratorial maneuverings of Armenian filmmakers. One Turkish Weekly piece, for example, devotes 31 pages, with footnotes, to exposing a conspiracy bent on feeding disinformation to the world, all of it disparaging Turkey and all originating in films being made by Armenians. Like so many "systematic" attacks on a subject, this marathon backfires, offering to those who can slog through it the names of Armenian films that they might want to check out.

Denying mass murder as an official lie - which the United States endorses - is one thing; conducting a scholarly inquiry into a world conspiracy takes you deeper into the realm of fantasy. Other Turkish writers get more specific, investigating Armenian efforts to produce a screen adaptation of the 1932 bestselling novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, by Franz Werfel, about Armenians who hold out in a mountain siege by Turkish forces who outnumber them. Their thesis: that the events depicted in Werfel's novel never happened and, by extension, the genocide of 1915 never happened, either.  See this site for details.

For those who might not be aware, Turkey intervened in Hollywood in the 1930s, when Werfel's novel was as big as Gone with the Wind, and Werfel himself would soon flee the Nazis in Austria to re-locate along with many of his colleagues to southern California. MGM was eager to adapt it, given the novel's popularity worldwide, but the film was never made, thanks to relentless pressure from the Turkish ambassador to the US at the time, who was the father of the Atlantic record executive Ahmet Ertegün. Nor was Musa Dagh made when Atom Egoyan tried several years ago, as I reported on NPR, when that network had something of a backbone in its cultural coverage.

The End of the Earth is a twist on the Robinson Crusoe story by the Iranian director Abolfazl Saffary. Sun-beaten and gaunt Hojjat has set up an outpost on a pile of scrap on a beach in southern Iran, in a place where he has arrived from northern Iran on foot that is officially called a Free Trade Zone. This beach is not glamorous for its remoteness and vivid beauty, nor is there much enforcement on the "free" end of things. Hojjat has come here to flee the world, but the world comes after him - soldiers, traders, a film crew (complete with a French director), a mullah with a mania for self-promotion, and a woman in need of his help after she flees a brutal husband. It's a parade that reminds Hojjat why he left civilization. We can assume that the civilization in this case is understood to be the Tehran regime.

I was told in Yerevan by people associated with The End of the Earth that the film had been banned by the Iranian government for scenes with drinking and scenes that showed the mullah who visits Hojjat to be a vain fool. Otherwise, I was told, it would have been in Locarno last summer. Yerevan was its first major showing, although not its world premiere. Cuts were made, but the mullah comes out being no more respectable. Officials could not have liked that character, but he's in the film nonetheless.

This feature has a spectacular look in its shots of stretches of bare sand under a harsh relentless sun. Hojatollahe Ghazvini Dadashi, the non-professional actor who plays Hojjat, couldn't look more quixotic in close-ups, shifting in his squinty mistrustful expression from hostility to incredulity and eventually launching into defiant speechifying when his unwelcome guests don't just leave. As striking as the landscape is, it won't make the tourist board happy. The implications of the story of man fleeing official constraints to live in such an unforgiving place won't be lost on the urban audiences who go to see films in Iran. That is, if anyone lets them see it.

The remote location in Thomas Ciulei's new documentary The Flower Bridge is a farm in Moldova where a father raises three children, now that his wife is working abroad. Moldova is the poorest country of Europe. Its best-known exports are its people, most notoriously as sex workers, who are abused horribly and particularly vulnerable because of their illegal status.

Thomas Ciulei (son of the theater director Liviu Ciulei) is probably best known for Asta e, his portrait of the Danube Delta, which premiered in Berlin in the Forum in 2001. Asta e, while in color, had a dark monochromatic palette that gave it a gloomy lyricism in its vision of the flat expanse of land and water where Europe's last leper colony can be found. You can see that same topography deployed into fiction in Delta, the new feature (at Cannes, in competition, this year) by the Hungarian director Kornel Mondruczo.

In Bridge, Ciulei's camera is embedded among the members of a family whose lives have a different austere palette than that of the delta. The family isn't among the very poor of Moldova. Plain-spoken Costica Ahir owns land and he operates a farm. Yet prices are low and the minimal technology ensures that next year will be much like this year, if the family can hold on to its property and the children, who have chicken pox as the film opens, are healthy enough to work. If the mother is sending money from abroad, this film gives you the impression that she isn't sending much. Here's an example of tough love, more in the how the seams holding life together are worn than in the way Costica Ahir dispenses affection.

Ciulei starts his story in January, when the trees are bare and the land is awaiting snow, and we move through a cold winter, and eventually into the first warmth and greenery of spring. The only news of the outside world comes by way of telephone, from the children's mother speaking briefly from Italy, where she has been for three years.

As the film observes a stark life lived in close spaces by a father, two daughters and a son, it sometimes has the feel of Etre et Avoir (To Be and To Have), Nicolas Philibert's tender documentary about a one-room schoolhouse that epitomizes community in rural France. Ciulei is looking at four people living on the edge - the edge of Europe, and the edge of their resources. It's a cold look at everyday life, more about survival than hope, although Ciulei does end each section and begin the next with contemplative shots of the landscape - an enchanting place, as long as you don't work there. (If Cold Mountain, which was shot in Romania, had been filmed in a place like this, it would have had the barrenness of a town that had survived the Civil War, and a touch of realism.) As I said, though, Costic and his children are far from the most deprived in Moldova.

For a picture of children at extreme risk in Moldova, see San Sanych, by George Agadjanean, which follows Sacha, a smart and savvy boy who has lost his mother to alcohol and is about to lose his father. (The film was in the GAIFF's Armenian Panorama, which includes films made in the Armenian diaspora.) The 52-minute television documentary starts positively as the portrait of a bright-eyed child with the best before him in life, and then watches circumstances drive the boy downward into what we used to call delinquency, with lots of detail (presented, as the critics might say, "unflinchingly") from a drab everyday life that we also see in The Flower Bridge. The only other place besides Yerevan where San Sanych has been screened is Moldova.

Back to features with a sense of place that were in Yerevan. This Beautiful City [site] by Ed Gass-Donnelly (which premiered at the Toronto festival last year) takes place in Parkdale, a Toronto neighborhood once abandoned to junkies, whores and pimps, where signs promoting a new generation of gentrifying condos promise that the beautification campaign that's sending in its first shock troops will eventually clean everything up. Not so fast, as we learn from the snarl of relationships that drives this story, once a pretty blonde gentrifier leaps from the new balcony of her gleaming condo to the gritty street below, just as cokehead Pretty (Kristin Booth) is working the alleys.

The film unfolds as collisions of characters suffering from different kinds of despair, with the violence and chaos of drug addiction helping to trigger explosions. Gass-Donnelly, who adapted the film from his play Descent, is remarkably spare in his choice of locations, which are never spacious enough to allow his characters to just walk away from each other. Even the exteriors feel claustrophobic, as you might expect from a director who began in the theater. Booth is uncomfortable to watch as a girl lurching toward the next fix and fleeing from her father, turning tricks for money on the way. Gass-Donnelly has a great feel for the way that destiny combines character and randomness. See this film before you decide to become an urban pioneer.

Set in western China's grain belt, The Red Awn by Shangjun Cai is the story of the return of a missing father to his hometown, to find out that his wife has died and his resentful son has declared him dead. The filmmaker's first feature as a director opens with a homecoming scene in which Soonghai, at the small-town police station, is told by a literal-minded officer that he must provide proof that he is indeed alive. And it's not just in the abstract. The son, Yongtao, angry at being abandoned by a parent who left for the city to earn money, even tries to kill his father. The enraged Yongtao gets a beating every time he challenges Soonghai, which is just about every time they are together. The young man even resents it when his father persuades a cute young girl to have sex with him. And so goes the father-son bond.

Despite its low budget and translated title that tells an English-speaking audience nothing (an awn is a "slender, bristle-like appendage found on the spikelets of many grasses"), The Red Awn has a big wide look to its landscape sequences, as crews of harvesters fight over stretches of land to reap. The film addresses a relevant problem, since many millions of Chinese, like the father in this story, leave their families to earn money where wages were better. Shangjun Cai suggests what the price might be.

- David D'Arcy

Earlier: Sean Axmaker on The Red Awn.

Posted by dwhudson at August 2, 2008 4:52 AM