Recently, the screening of the documentary film “1489” about the 44-Day War took place in Yerevan. Shoghakat Vardanyan’s film was presented twice at the 21st Golden Apricot International Film Festival, both times the audience left the hall shocked and having survived the war once again.
Before the two screenings that took place, Shoghakat in her short speech remembered the Armenian prisoners held in Azerbaijan and mentioned that it is our duty to do everything for their return home.
The film is the author’s documentary on the search for his brother Solomon, who went missing on the seventh day of the 44-Day War. “A film that is like a light penetrating inside, makes visible the vast hidden inner landscape of grief, creating a real presence out of an intolerable absence:” the IDFA jury described the documentary.
It should be noted that the film is one of the films that received the greatest international attention of independent Armenia, which also received the “Best Documentary” award of the Trieste Film Festival, and after being shown and awarded at many other film festivals, it was finally shown in Yerevan.
Soghomon was born in an artistic family. He was a talented pianist. He also learned to play the trumpet before going to the army.
He was searched for five months as missing, and on February 18, 2021, his parents were officially informed that Solomon’s remains had been found through DNA testing. His parents managed to find out that until the morning of October 4, he was fighting in Jrakan, from where they retreated and he helped a volunteer.
Speaking about whether shooting the film brought her relief, Shoghakat, who lost her brother in the war, says: “No, it did not bring relief. In fact, the result was quite the opposite. It made my already troubled life even more stressful. If I hadn’t made the film, I might not have seen the difficult, emotional moments that my parents were going through. But because I was filming them, I saw everything. Actually, it was very complicated. Basically, I had to do two things at the same time. For my parents, I remained their daughter, even if I was on the opposite side of the camera. They talked to me; they needed my support. I couldn’t temporarily not be a daughter or sister during filming. In that situation, it was necessary to make decisions that I didn’t even know how to make. Grief was still unknown to me; I was just following my feelings.”
Shoghakati says that almost every night she thought that she would no longer be able to continue, but the next day she picked up the camera again. “It actually came to a point where I had to make a very, very difficult decision as a sister to make the film universal. An early draft version of the film ended with archival footage of my brother playing the piano. It was a concert he participated in before leaving for the army. For a long time, even for years, I hesitated whether to leave those shots or not. At the final stage of editing, I realized that the footage should not remain. In the end, I deleted it and realized that this way the film would become the story of every person who survived the war.”
Ani Gevorgyan
Ani Gevorgyan is a journalist, photographer, and the winner of the Freedom of Speech Award. She has participated in photo exhibitions at the UN headquarters (New York) and the Geneva office, the Palace of Europe (Strasbourg), Paris, Rome, Berlin, Vienna and elsewhere.