ASKARIAN FILM
Don Askarian

 

The most important Armenian-born director since Sergei Paradjanov, Don Askarian has created a body of films that explore the history and spirit of his native land. He does so in a modern idiom, inflected with surrealist overtones and powerful imagery--often described as magical realist--that embrace the extremes of beauty and brutality. Born in 1949 in Nagorno Karabakh, in the former Soviet Union, Askarian traveled to Moscow to study history and art and worked as an assistant film director and film critic before being imprisoned in 1975. Emigrating to West Berlin in 1978, Askarian began to create his meditations on Armenia from his home in exile, beginning with an adaptation of Chekov’s The Bear, in 1984. Since that time, he has directed a range of works, from documentaries to biographical essays to fiction features, that have been honored at festival screenings worldwide.
 
KOMITAS

TECHNICAL DATA:

1988, Germany, 35 mm, 96 min, color and b/w,

 

SYNOPSIS

The film is dedicated to the Armenian monk and genius composer Komitas, and the 2 million victims on his people in Turkey in 1915.

The final 20 years of Komitas life were spent in various mental hospitals.

The destiny of Komitas? This is the magic beauty of Armenian culture and the abhorrent brutality of Armenian history.

A cultural and artistic world that was slaughtered with a curved knife.

A humanity that doggedly advances towards an apocalyptic catastrophe, that does not recognize its own original purpose, eradicates its own memory, its final roots
Read more...
 
AVETIK

1992, Germany/Armenia , 35 mm, 84 min, color.

 

"Dali, Tarkovski, Bunuel, Deren ... Add the name of Armenian director Don Askarian to the ranks of this dream team. His latest film "Avetik" is very much in tradition of the cinema of dreams. A gorgeous and mesmerizing film, "Avetik" both thrills the eye and boggles the mind. It takes you on a journey of the mind that leads to heaven or hell - a succulent garden full of bare-breasted goddesses or a frozen step of devastation and death". "Askarian is capable of producing images that are unlike anything ever seen before, yet hit you with a primal immediacy".

Giovanni Fazio, "The Japan Times" 25 March, 1995

Read more...
 
PARADJANOV

16 mm, BETA SP, 60 min, color.

 

DIRECTOR ABOUT THE FILM

Year 1989. Rotterdam Film Festival. Farewell at hotel "Hilton". And he speaks: «Help to shoot "Confession"». In reply: «The child of two fathers, will be born bastard». Actually I wanted to say: «This lustful, voracious, scruffy lady, whose name is cinema, needs to be fucked as to... And only loners - they were less than fingers on one hand - only those who work in deep, infinite loneliness...». Afterwards, he was dying long in Armenia - asking all the time to visit him, and I was shooting "Avetik" all the time. At last, I came. He pretended he was already dead. Then I pulled out of my pocket a cloth bought in Goa from gipsy woman (all winds of the Indian ocean unable to overcome the strong smell of her genitals), and unfold it. There was a lion watching TV, there was an elephant twisting pedals... he opened his eyes a little to look at the woman's ring, who had come with me - the diamonds and sapphire were original. Amazed Sergey even half rose - and the bitch-death left us alone for a couple of hours... Then he died and there was semi-official filthy - crowd of jackals were fighting for percents from his glory... I've told myself: «After, after when a corpse will divide and carry away... ». And here the film is ready. I know, it is close to your heart, and sorry, that I'll show it to others ...

Read more...
 
ARARAT 14 Views

TECHNICAL DATA:

Fiction & documentary, length -76 min, color & b. & w, HDV

 

SYNOPSIS

It's no matter for it - who walks on it - the Turk, the Armenian, the Kurd or a camel, and about state boarder it doesn't think at all. The relations to it have mineralogists, well, volcanologists, but the speech is not about: gang of robbers kills numismatists under the canopy of sacred mountain Ararat and Phil, their victim, casually survives.

If the film is there, it is not because it has been defined by the audience, not by the producer/director, not by ratings, not in Cannes or in LA, no, it is realised through the film itself, in the context of the film, by every film, every film that has already been made and by every film that's going to be made in the future, because there is a constant dialogue going on between all films, including those as yet unmade. To recognize this deep secret reality and law of film, and to obey, yes, even to serve them - that is what I call Ontological Film Making.

Read more...
 

Festival Events

 

Festival Guests

Festivals Partner

Tiff Links

Festival Retrospectives