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There is a point during Tamara Stepanyan’s My Armenian Phantoms when the documentary cuts to the final scene of the 1980 Soviet film, A Piece of Sky, in which the orphaned lead character, joyfully rides a horse and cart through the town that had long shunned him and the sex worker he married as social outcasts.
A flock of birds are then framed gliding through the pristine blue sky above. It’s a sequence depicting the desire to overcome the forces that seek to limit and constrain which lay at the heart of the director Henrik Malyan’s new wave critique.
Or, as Malyan says in an unearthed interview that forms part of Stepanyan’s archival exploration: “It is about the fake and real concept of love … and without trying to sound pathetic, our film is about freedom.”
Freedom, and what that entails for both the landlocked republic of Armenia and its large diaspora, has come into sharper focus against this decade’s backdrop of war, displacement and conflicts over sovereignty and identity.
It is estimated that there are around three times more ethnic Armenians living outside the country than within it – a factor that has given rise to the idea of “stateless power” linked to a region that is increasingly the site of geopolitical tensions between the US, Russia and Iran.
Sossie Kasbarian, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Stirling, says: “The diaspora can act as a complement to the nation state, and as a dynamic site of (trans)national identity and culture.
“The experience of being Armenian in the republic, and being Armenian in the post-genocide western diaspora are two distinct historical experiences, and their cultural production will reflect that.”
One such reflection is My Armenian Phantoms – an audiovisual journey through the works produced by her country’s lost pantheon of cinematic pioneers, prompted by the passing of the director’s father, the actor Vigen Stepanyan, in 2021. Through the nostalgic collage of personal archives and Soviet-era film, Tamara reflects on the state of a national cinema “organically linked to a political, social and cultural universe that has now disappeared”.
The documentary, which is Armenia’s entry for the best international feature category at the Oscars in March, had its UK premiere during the Armenian film festival in London last week.
Returning for a second year, the festival – which ran from 4 to 7 December at the ICA – opened with the biopic, Monsieur Aznavour, featuring a performance by Tahar Rahim cast in the leading role as the iconic French Armenian singer-songwriter Charles Aznavour.
Also premiering was Eric Nazarian’s Die Like a Man, set in working-class Los Angeles and shot in a fortnight using a cast of mostly untrained actors – many of whom were Angelenos affected by the carceral state. The film serves as an example of what Kasbarian describes as “Armenian communities [being] part of the fabric of each of their societies and [sharing] all their concerns”.
This year, the four-day event secured BFI funding for the first time and is fast establishing itself among the UK’s Armenian community. Concentrated in London and Manchester, they form part of a global diaspora that shares the scarring memories of repression, displacement and genocide.
Tatevik Ayvazyan, one of the festival’s organisers and a member of the Armenian Film Society, says that “for a small, fragmented community, it was heartening and very rewarding to see how much the festival resonated and how well we did in the first year”.
Regarding the history of migration that has shaped the diaspora in Britain, Ayvazyan says: “The Armenian community in the UK came in waves. The first, most significant wave to Manchester [were] escaping the Hamidian massacres, which were the precursor to the Armenian genocide.
“They came from Cyprus, from Iran after the revolution, from Iraq after the war, from the Soviet Union after the break-up. There is a horrific amount of baggage, from genocide, from displacement.
“Somebody would come to me and ask: ‘Can we have more comedies?’”
In the opening scene of Monsieur Aznavour, a young Charles watches, claps and participates in a community gathering. There’s music and dance, but interspersed with the images of joy are glimpses of footage – reminders of what led to their exile in interwar France – showing the starvation and deportations that took place during the genocide that killed more than a million people between 1915 and 1922.
Ayvazyan adds: “We want to have intelligent, awareness-raising art about the tragedies we have faced … [but there is also] the importance of talking about and engaging with other cultures, because stories of displacement, war and identity are not unique to us. Every war and genocide happening in the world resonates with us.”
Recently, Armenia has been in a state of flux. Two years after a popular uprising in 2018 ousted the old guard of Armenian politics, the country was plunged into war with neighbouring Azerbaijan over the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Stemming from an unresolved conflict of post-Soviet borders and territories, the Armenian-majority region held a degree of autonomy within Azerbaijan as the Republic of Artsakh, until Baku sought to end its de facto independence militarily, with Turkish support.
By 2023, a major offensive and subsequent acts of ethnic cleansing forced thousands of Armenians to flee the region for Armenia in yet another cycle of tragedy and disorientation. Hemmed in by major regional powers, there are signs that the country is pivoting further to the west in an attempt to break out of its constrained position.
Kira Adibekov, who worked alongside Ayvazyan to organise the film festival and is involved with a project called Tumo that provides free creative education to teenagers, says: “It is clear that Russia traded the Republic of Artsakh for a deal with Turkey and Azerbaijan.”
Earlier this year, Armenia’s parliament passed a bill to begin the process of joining the EU, and in August, Donald Trump turned his attention to the region with a US-brokered peace treaty signed by Yerevan and Baku, including provisions for a “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (Tripp).
Although viewed as a “vague proposal”, Adibekov says that the prospect of Tripp has “brought some calm” in the region with the hope of regional communications that initiatives like the Tumo project may benefit from.
Reflecting on contemporary Armenia, which will mark the 35th anniversary since its independence from the former USSR next year, Ayvazyan says “Under the shiny facade of relations with the EU, the country still needs to recover from the war and learn how to function after years of Soviet and oligarchic rule.”
