Shoghakat Vardanyan, 1489, 2023.
Access the Croatian original here.
When in 2020 the decades-long conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh flared up again, Soghomon Vardanyan was serving in the army. He was only 21 years old; he was a student, a saxophonist, and his parents and older sister were waiting for him to come home. Twelve days after all information about him disappeared, Shoghakat Vardanyan began recording the family diary of the search for her brother.
Vardanyan, an academically trained pianist, mentions in the subtitles at the very beginning that she is showing her first film, a work in a medium she got into by chance. With film, one can testify in a way he or she cannot with a bare statement, sound, or even a singular image, as Vardanyan herself makes aware in numerous interviews. Film is effective in communicating a larger, more complex experience that can touch the masses, both with its historical and intimate dimensions.
Titled after the code used for soldiers missing in action, 1489 (2023) is worth reading on both of these levels. It is a work that at the same time creates no confusion either structurally or stylistically, in which the story’s setting is painfully clear. Nevertheless, hardly anything is said in the classical sense, except in the final subtitles, as Vardanyan rounds off the geopolitical and historical context.
1489 discloses things the way only a film can – it reveals the everyday life of the Vardanyan family, from the father’s contemplation in the studio where until then stone sculptures and various drawings were being created, through family conversations, to late-night listening to the news from the battlefield so fresh that it has not been translated into Armenian. Vardanyan does not fall into pathos or mythomania, yet does not shy away from emotionally demanding scenes, opening some of them with symbolic interpretations, such as the one in which the father catches a bird and sets it free from the balcony.
1489 – awarded, among other things, with two awards at last year’s IDFA – successfully conveys the feeling of missing, suffering and uncertainty, while aesthetically and compositionally remains at a very high level. Vardanyan demonstrates an impeccable understanding of the frame’s space, especially for someone who carries out the entire project on her own, let alone for an amateur and debut one. Filming the documentary without a clear initial structure, the author uses a mobile phone camera, often informing the household members on how to appear in front of it, and improvises on the spot. The encouragement of her journalism mentor at the time keeps her persistent in her recording.
Vardanyan extended the filming to two years, closing the cycle that many families like hers go through during and after the war. After the 1990s, the reception of such a film in this region has a special dimension. One identifies with what is seen. For Armenians, of whom more than 3,800 were officially killed in the Second War for Nagorno-Karabakh alone, and unofficially over five thousand, such self-representation is of special importance. As the rest of the subtitles in Vardanyan’s film indicate, over two hundred Armenians are considered missing like Soghomon, and at least eighty are prisoners in Azerbaijan. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenians were continuously displaced from the disputed area, including during 2023. 1489 thus has an anti-colonial, freedom-loving streak that cannot give meaning to suffering such as Soghomon’s but at least pays tribute to it, despite the fact that Armenians, it is clear today, have lost the 2020s war in question.
A scene more powerful than both that of the discovery of human remains and that of the preparation for the funeral is that of the director’s confrontation with the camera as she stands with her freshly shaved head before her brother’s photo on the wall. The resemblance between the two is striking. In a separate scene, it seems as if the looking is looking for his daughter’s cut hair, the one the viewer identifies from the beginning of the film. He touches her head and, perhaps, it is right there that his centrality in the microcosm of their incomplete family culminates. The remaining impression is that a lot is being done for a patriarchal, even martial gaze – the director revives the image of the brother at the expense of herself and feminine symbols. This practice of cutting hair, characteristic of mourning across cultures and with its roots in medieval Christianity, is still impossible to separate from the idea that war is primarily the suffering of the male lineage and the loss of the fatherland, i.e. the country and identity that signify the masculine.