DOCUMENTARIST

A vast wilderness, without trees or contours. A battered car with people making a movie about a devastated country whose population is suffering from the seemingly endless consequences of war, poverty and migration: Armenia – crushed by the weight of its own history. The documentary-filmmaker wants to record the situation in his homeland as mercilessly and comprehensively as possible. His subject is life in all of its facets. So he creates an arc – ranging from birth in a delivery room to the loneliness of children in an orphanage, to the happiness at parties of poor people and the misery of a beggar, up to death – the death of his own cameraman. We see stray dogs being hunted, see nature and life itself treated mercilessly. With his small crew and modest equipment, the documentarist tries to play the part of an indifferent observer, but does not always succeed. Interviewing a young boy at the train station, he tells him to start crying for all that he has suffered – but the boy has his own time for tears. The director reflects on a second level, through the style of his film (grainy black and white, handwritten subtitles, harsh cuts), on the situation of filmmaking and thereby shows how he comprehends his own role.