The second year of London’s Armenian film festival reflects a country in flux as the legacy of recent conflict with Azerbaijan hangs over attempts to strengthen ties with the west
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.
