Name: Cinema of Belonging: 100 Years of Armenian Film – Hello, It’s Me + Flight
Start: 2023-11-24T19:30:00+01:00
Location: MACA Moving Arts Centre Amsterdam

Cinema of Belonging: 100 Years of Armenian Film – Hello, It’s Me + Flight

MACA Amsterdam

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

MACA Moving Arts Centre Amsterdam

The opening of the Cinema of Belonging programme is a quintessential masterpiece from the 1960’s Soviet Armenian cinema renaissance, newly restored in 4K. Prior to the feature Hello, It’s Me, the short film Flight by Anna Mkrtumyan will be screened.&nbsp;About Hello It’s Me:&nbsp;Despite it being heavily influenced by the new Moscow film wave of the 1960’s, Frunze Dovlatyan’s 1966 Hello, It’s Me is not just an Armenian classic, but a truly quintessential Armenian film. Very loosely based on the life of the founder of Armenian physics Artem Alikhanian, Hello, It’s Me conveys the quietly heartbreaking story of a Soviet-Armenian scientist called Artyom, who even after achieving great success in his field, cannot shake off the heavy burden of memories of his beloved Lyusya, whom he lost to the frontlines of World War II.&nbsp;This was Dovlatyan’s first unaided directorial effort after graduating from VGIK (All-Union State Institute of Cinema) and co-directing two features in Moscow, so it is no surprise that he brought that emerging post-Stalinist aesthetic to Armenia and became one of its prominent representatives in the Soviet Union. However, Dovlatyan was by far no newcomer when he was admitted to VGIK in the late 1950’s. Born in 1927, he became a theater and cinema actor at a very young age and even acted in a couple of films by Hamo Beknazaryan, the father of Armenian cinema, in the late 1940’s.Hello, It’s Me remained his crowning achievement and probably that of almost everyone involved in the making of the film, including debutant Arnold Aghababov, who allegedly wrote the script after locking himself in a hotel room for a whole month, cinematographer Albert Yavuryan, lead actor Armen Dzhigarkhanyan, who afterwards became one of the biggest stars of Soviet cinema, and finally the editorial committee of Soviet Armenia’s Hayfilm Studio, which tirelessly worked on the script and aided the director, as if they all knew they had something really special in their hands. This was also the stunning screen debut of Margarita Terekhova, who is most famous today for her brilliant performance in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror.As the film wanders back and forth from Soviet Armenia to Moscow in the early 1940’s to the late 1950’s, so do Artyom’s memories keep dragging him all across his past trauma. Much of the film are scenes of silent contemplation, quite aimless walks across city streets, roofs and parks, characters staring, glancing longingly at one another with muted sounds and under the sighs of a yearnful trumpet music composed by Martin Vardazaryan.&nbsp;A voice from beyond the screen remarks: “People, do not drag the past on your backs!”. To which Artyom replies: “But what can I do if the past is with me and if I have memories?” Is it just fate’s irony that a film full of thoughts like these was being made in 1965, the year of the 50th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, when after decades of silence and an unofficial ban on the subject in the Soviet Union, Armenians took to the streets of Yerevan demanding that the genocide in the Ottoman Empire not be forgotten? In the end, Artyom’s struggle is that of the entire nation unable to heal from trauma, a people who cannot deal with their past, both tragic and great, and thus struggle to this day to find their footing in modern times.Dovlatyan’s masterpiece became the first and only Armenian feature-length film to be included in the main competition at Cannes, and in May 2023, the newly restored film returned to the festival as part of Cannes Classics. That very same 4K restoration will be presented at the opening of Cinema of Belonging: 100 Years of Armenian Film at MACA on November 24 at 19:30. About Flight: An airport, designed to grant wings and extend one’s physical freedom. However, in Anna Mkrtumyan’s wordless cinematic poem Flight the empty halls of Artsakh’s (Nagorno-Karabakh’s) only civilian aerodrome transform into a haunting metaphor for the inhumanity and injustice faced by the unrecognized republic.&nbsp;Mkrtumyan, herself a native of Stepanakert, the capital of Artsakh, made this short as her diploma film while studying film directing in Armenia at a time, when the feeling of a looming catastrophe was in the air, but nothing too concrete – just a threat from Azerbaijani authorities to shoot down any civilian aircraft that would dare to land or take off from the newly restored Stepanakert airport. It’s that eerie sensation of isolation that she manages to convey so well in under 4 minutes: the sounds of airport hassle with not a single soul in sight, a spinning conveyer belt where each mat almost slices the screen like a razor and a body scanner buzzing and blinking red with the heavy cords of the soundtrack beating the image. The only living being in the frame is a tiny bird and whether or not it will succeed to fly beyond the bars of its cage remains ambiguous.&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.&nbsp;

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Cinema of Belonging: 100 Years of Armenian Film – Hello, It’s Me + Flight

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