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Golden Apricot Film Festival of Yerevan 2009: Films about Borders, Peace and Children’s rights

Yerevan, July 19, 2009 (Guido Convents) - Considering the Golden Apricot Film Festival one has to agree with the Mayor of Yerevan that this festival always brings a number of films together which provide a unique opportunity for the spiritual communication of nations and individuals, “for mutual recognition and understanding”. In his view this festival has a spiritual mission in bringing films together from Armenia and the diaspora.

"The Other Bank" won the Ecumenical Jury prize

The same view is expressed by Ralph Yirikian, the General Manager of the Festival. He believes he also has a responsibility for fostering Armenian culture. He wants to support Armenian cinema in its efforts to remain vital and relevant to the spiritual needs of the Armenian audience. He considers Armenian national identity a real treasure. According to Yirikian, the Armenians can only preserve their identity by exposing their values to the world and by learning from the world’s cultural values, a spirit which has been seen by the Ecumenical Jury since 2007.

Children have the right to be children

The General Director of the film festival, Haruthun Khachatryan, presented his new film Border (Shaman) which was an excellent reflection on one of the central themes of the festival. In a way reminiscent of some of the films of Sokoruv, Khachatryan situates the events of his story in the turmoil in the Caucasus over the last twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet empire. After the Armenian-Azeri war the border becomes a serious matter. Near the barbed wire of this demarcation line there is a farm in a small village which is itself a small community of refugees. One day the farmers find a buffalo in the swamps which they rescue and bring to their farm. The events which happen with the buffalo build the dramatic situation of the story. In a contemplative way, the camera observes the life of the farm through the eyes of the buffalo; the different seasons, the peaceful work together of the farmers. At the end the animal, an innocent being, dies senselessly among the obstacles which mark the border. Its calf, orphaned, lives on, not “understanding” what happened.

Children orphaned or traumatized by the war or violence because of the separation caused by borders was one of the recurrent themes. In The Other Bank , by George Ovashvili, a young boy lives with his mother as a refugee in Tbilisi (Georgia). He misses his father who stayed behind when they left their home in Abkhazia. They live very poorly and have no money. He cannot stand it when his mother prostitutes herself. He tries to earn money, illegally, but then decides to go and search for his farther in Abkhazia. It is his way of growing up. He discovers both the negative and the positive face of the world. He meets people who, although they have suffered a lot in the war with Georgia, put away their feelings of hate for Georgians to help him. It is Ovashvili’s first feature film. He needed more than four years to finish it. He not only got the Ecumenical Award but also the Golden Apricot for the best feature film.

Be calm and Count to Seven is a film by the Iranian director, Ramtin Lavafipour. It also has a young boy as protagonist who loses his fisherman father when he uses his boat to smuggle people across the border. The father disappears. The boy tries to make money by smuggling, because there are no longer any fish to catch. When he finds out that his father is probably dead he wants to cross the border to look for him.

War, family and opium in Afghanistan are the background of "Opium War"

Almost the same story is told in the US film Looking for Palladin by Andrzej Krakowski. An arrogant Hollywood talent agent is sent by his company to Guatemala to look for an older actor, Jack Palladin (played by Ben Gazzara), in fact, he is actually going to see his stepfather who he has never met. He is bitter and thinks he can convince Palladin to come back with him. But Palladin has built a quiet life with friends and family and even a great deal of money cannot tempt him to leave. His stepson then discovers other values as well as his real father. He explains to him how much he suffered by his absence. At the end they come to terms with each other recognizing that family values are more important than professional success. The young man tells his father and stepfather that he did not have a real childhood, because his parents were never there for him.

In Opium War , from the Afghan director Siddiq Barmak, known for his first film Osama (2003), shows the important border of non-communication that exists between the allied troops in his country and the local community. When two American soldiers survive a helicopter crash their presence is tolerated by an Afghan family who have suffered through the war. The central figure in the story is a young boy who in the absence of the old and one legged father of three wives, has to take care of the family. The young boy has the responsibility for the well being of the family. He does not have a grudge against the soldiers to whom he gives food for their work. The problem is that he has to deal with the Taliban who are coming for the family’s opium harvest.

Sometimes adults transgress the sexual boundaries of a child. In the French film Sois Sage , Juliette Garcias tells the story of a young woman who comes into a small village where she starts working in a bakery. In the beginning her curiosity about the intimate life of her employer and his wife looks strange. She also does not want to have a boyfriend. She tells everybody that her parents are dead. Then it seems that she is stalking her former lover who is married and has a child. Her behavior is very strange and tense. Her former lover explains that for him she does not matter anymore. At the end, the spectator discovers that the lover is her father who abused her when she was a little girl.

Children have the right to have parents

"The Prince of Broadway" is about a child who brings meaning to the lives of people around him

Lucky, an illegal immigrant in New York works on the street selling counterfeit designer clothing, shoes and bags. He wants to study and build a good life for himself. Then a former girl friend puts a little child before him, saying that it is his child. At first, Lucky is troubled. He has doubts about his fatherhood but he takes care of and tries to educate the child. The child changes his life, and also his relationship with his girlfriend and even his Italian employer. He tries to be a good parent for the child and to give him a future even if he is not his son. And so The Prince of Broadway , by the American Sean Baker, can be thought of as a kind of “angel film” or even a “Jesus film” about a child who brings meaning to the lives of people around him. Almost the same story, but less powerful, is the subject of the Italian film La Pivellina from Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel. In a park near her trailer, a grandmother finds a very young child with a letter from the mother explaining she has a problem and cannot take care of it. The old women decides to take the child home and look after it and sees that it has everything it needs, attention, food, entertainment and so on. Her husband urges her to bring the child to the polic but she does not in hope that the mother returns. Meanwhile she looks after the child as if she was the mother.

The Dubai short film Arabana (6 min. dir. Nayla Al Khaja) tells how an eight-year-old girl is totally neglected by her parents. They do not take care of her even when she walks off in a dangerous environment. “This open-ended story strongly conveys the message that children should be loved and watched over”, says the director. But in the Ukraine documentary Not Alone At Home , Olena Fetisova tells, in 52 minutes, the story of a well-educated woman who found her mission in taking care of seriously sick abandoned children of different nationalities. She builds a family with them. In The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around , the Bulgarian film maker, Stephan Komandarev, goes back into the past to the time a family has to leave communist Bulgaria for political reasons. It is a story of how a grandson leaves his grandfather who he loves and with whom he plays dice. The son and grandson have to cross borders to find a place to live in Germany. Then there is an accident and the adult man loses his memory. He does not remember the past. He does not know anything about his parents and what they endured for him. The grandfather decides to travel to his grandson to help him to regain his memories of his parents and his past. In this way he not only recalls the past thirty years for the young man but also for a public who have forgotten what happened during the communist era and what trauma it meant for political refugees crossing borders into unknown countries.

In the retrospective of the Japanese film director Kohei Oguri the presence of children in his films is also a key element. In Muddy River (Doro No Kawa, 1981) a family still afflicted by the trauma of the Second World War live on the riverside and own a tavern. Then a boat arrives and Nobuo the family’s nine-year-old son, makes friends with the young boy and his sister on the boat. Both boat children discover family life with the family who own the tavern. They do not go to school but have to work instead. One day Nobuo discovers that their mother is a prostitute and that the father died because of psychological damage caused by the war. This knowledge does not break his friendship with the brother and his sister but their mother decides to leave to avoid Nobuo.

Religion and the past

The first film shot on Mount Athos, "The Monk’s Republic" was one of the highlights of the festival

Central elements in the understanding of Armenian national identity are their religion and the Ottoman genocide of 1915. The genocide has become a recurrent theme in the cinema. There are documentaries and fiction films on the topic, or it is mentioned in other films. The River Ran Red , by the American Armenian director Michael Hagopian, is a collection of thirty eyewitness accounts depicting the search for survivors of that genocide. Hagopian is a producer and writer and established the Armenian Film Foundation which has produced 17 videos and films on Armenian culture and history. The River Ran Red is the result of 40 years of filming some 400 survivors and witnesses of the genocide of 1915. These films deal with human rights, international justice and understanding.

At the festival there were also some interesting films about religion such as Ararat: the Sacrament of the Armenians’ Immortality (Ararat : Hayots anmahutyan Khorhurde) which is a story by the Georgian Ashot Melkonyan about the Biblical mountain Ararat beginning from the day Noah’s ark landed until the days of Friedrich Wilhelm Parrot (1792-1941) and Khachatur Abovyan (1809-1948). The film not only looks to the past but follows a group of pilgrims who climbed the mountain in 2007.

One of the highlights of the festival was the documentary Mont Athos, la république des moines (Mount Athos, the Monk’s Republic). The director Eddy Vicken and scriptwriter Yvon Bertorello worked almost 7 years on this film which is the first shot on Mount Athos.

Finally, one of the special awards of the festival was given to Turkish director, Ozcan Alper for his film Autum (Sonbahar) which opens a strong debate on the political turmoil of the 1990s when politically active students were imprisoned by the Turkish government. One of them is released on the eve of his death. He goes to his mother, who is a widow and who has missed him all these years. The young man is disillusioned because he was not able to realize any of his ideals. One of the German journalists at the closing ceremony observed that it is incredible that today Turkish films and Turkish directors can come to Yerevan, fifteen years ago it would have been impossible.

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