GAIFF Day One: Ararat to the West, Karabakh to the East
Armenian Suffering on film. Then and now.
Yerevan is not an easy place to get to. One missed connection and everything can go wrong.
Just as I passed a breezy (too breezy) security control in Berlin, the worst happened. Like a gut punch to the stomach, a text from Eurowings: my flight to Vienna (where I would be catching an onward flight) was cancelled. Several frantic (and expensive) hours of rebooking and travelling through Warsaw followed; my final 11 pm flight a chaotic mess of babies crying, attendants loudly hawking 1 am perfumes and bright, sleep-abolishing lights. By the time I got to the airport — 4:30 in the morning — everything felt strange and unreal.
It was a LOT.
Despite the early hours, the airport was alive. Some kind of international celebrity (or very rich man at his bachelor party) arrived, greeted by a gaggle of busy women in sailor outfits, evoking the fantasies of Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can (Steven Spielberg, 2002) before they chaperoned him to his limousine.
And in the short taxi from the airport to the hotel, several strip clubs — including the instantly striking Burlesque, with a building-sized Eiffel Tower — remained open for business. Yet despite the preponderance of garish scenes, there was also a certain beauty in uncovering a new city in the early hours of the morning; a pink sunrise forming over the river, buildings and distant mountains. Yerevan had already weaved its special charm.
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Armenia is a small nation wedged deep in the Caucasus. Its people have suffered endless forms of occupation, war, and ethnic cleansing that continue to this day. To the west is Turkey, still in denial about the genocide of 1915-17, and to the east is Azerbaijan, who recently annexed the historically Armenian region of Nogorno-Karabakh in 2023. These two sides to Armenia’s suffering, the slaughter of its people and the contraction of its borders, are excellently explored in two tonally and stylistically opposed films: the documentary Orbita (Yervand Vardanyan, 2024) and a new restoration of Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (2002, feature image).
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema