Name: Cinema of Belonging: 100 Years of Armenian Film – Calendar + White Town
Start: 2023-11-26T19:30:00+01:00
Location: MACA Moving Arts Centre Amsterdam

Cinema of Belonging: 100 Years of Armenian Film – Calendar + White Town

MACA Amsterdam

Celebrating the centennial of Armenian film with a curation of its many cinematic gems.

MACA Moving Arts Centre Amsterdam

Summary:This form-bending early masterpiece by Atom Egoyan set in Armenia poignantly explores questions surrounding identity, diaspora and social belonging. The restored edition of Calendar will be screened with a video introduction by the director himself, alongside Harutyun Khachatryan’s short documentary White Town.&nbsp; This form-bending early masterpiece by Atom Egoyan set in Armenia poignantly explores questions surrounding identity, diaspora and social belonging. The restored edition of Calendar will be screened with a video introduction by the director himself, alongside Harutyun Khachatryan’s short documentary White Town.&nbsp;About Calendar։Right before making his international breakthrough Exotica, the film that won him the FIPRESCI prize in Cannes in 1994 and cemented his reputation as one of the most original voices of his generation, Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan traveled to his ancestral homeland Armenia for the first time, where a smaller, but no less fascinating and truly one of kind film called Calendar was born in 1993. A real mosaic of a film, Calendar deals with the issue of cultural identity and social belonging, as do many of Egoyan’s works. Egoyan and his wife, actress Arsinée Khanjian, play an Armenian couple from Canada who visit Armenia, so that the husband can photograph ancient Armenian churches for a calendar project a diasporan Armenian association is implementing. However, the photographer slowly realizes that a connection is growing between his wife and their driver played by Ashot Adamyan, who also acts as a guide. The wife stays, while the photographer returns to Canada and tries to figure out what happened through a series of dinners with a variety of escorts.The film is very loosely autobiographical, as it features thoughts and experiences Egoyan himself had as he was discovering his Armenian identity and how that conflicted with his factual social role as a Canadian. Egoyan has said that the photographer is the worst nightmare he feared he would become. There’s a famous story that as a young boy Egoyan almost in protest basically refused to speak Armenian for a long time after his grandmother, who only spoke Armenian to him, was transferred to a home for the elderly. In many ways, his meeting and relationship with Arsinée Khanjian, herself a Lebanese-Armenian, who was forced to flee the civil war in Lebanon, was an event that greatly contributed to Egoyan’s renewed interest in his ancestral identity. That dynamic is somewhat recreated in Calendar in typical Egoyan fashion, where different timeframes, images and sounds entwine into one to form a highly cerebral and emotional end result, aimed at solving the puzzle that is a human’s relation to what makes them who they are.&nbsp;2023 marks the 30th anniversary of this masterpiece and Cinema of Belonging will present a new restoration of the film and a special video greetings from Atom Egoyan himself.&nbsp;About White Town։Something was rotten in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Armenian filmmaker Harutyun Khachatryan made that abundantly clear in his 1988 short documentary White Town. Here the director goes back to the place of his birth and childhood, an Armenian-populated town in Georgia called Akhalkalaki right on the border between the two countries, and lets the camera roam around the snowy streets, capturing everyday scenes, theater performances and parade after parade. However, this black and white space, where even the Russian and Armenian languages spoken in the distance through megaphones sound almost unintelligible, hides a darkness perhaps not visible to the naked eye, but palpable through the juxtaposition of official Soviet rituals and the mass confusion in close ups. Even a happy occasion like a wedding is made endlessly unnerving as the director chooses to mute the human voices and crank up the cheerful music. Eyes and faces are desperate to speak, but can’t, as young men are drafted to the army and loaded into a bus in the final years of the Soviet Union’s catastrophic war in Afghanistan. Lenin’s statue is standing tall pointing to a glorious communist future, while Gorbachov’s portrait is being carried through the town square, but they no longer hold any ideological meaning, rather they’re just dead attributes, which makes the stench of decomposition all the more powerful. Basically, by conveying the pre-mortem convulsions of the Soviet empire, the film presents its post-mortem as well.&nbsp;Although radically different in terms of both style and substance, White Town and Atom Egoyan’s 1993 film Calendar make a peculiar double bill with one expressing the demise of the Soviet state and the other depicting a diaspora Armenian finding her identity in the newly independent Republic of Armenia.&nbsp;About the programme: Cinema of Belonging celebrates the centennial of Armenian film with a curation of its many cinematic gems. Besides an examination of the riches of Armenian cinema, the programme of 5 features and multiple shorts also functions as a fundraiser for the displaced people of Artsakh: all the ticket proceeds of Cinema of Belonging will be donated to local initiatives in Armenia to support refugees from Artsakh.

Our {communityGuidelinesLink} describe the sort of content we prohibit on Eventbrite. If you suspect an event may be in violation, you can report it to us so we can investigate.

To report other categories of prohibited or illegal content, submit {link}

Cinema of Belonging: 100 Years of Armenian Film – Calendar + White Town

More events from MACA Amsterdam

Discover more events from MACA Amsterdam, from Film & Media to other experiences you might love.

Cinema of Belonging: 100 Years of Armenian Film – Calendar + White Town

More events from MACA Amsterdam

Discover more events from MACA Amsterdam, from Film & Media to other experiences you might love.

You might also like...

Browse more events with different dates, prices, and formats to find your next great experience.