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Last review: 16.06.2003

New Letter: 07.04.2003

Askarian Film

4th of September2003
 

Press release

We are pleased to inform you about a retrospective of the work of the well-known German-Armenian director, producer and author Don Askarian in Berlin (9.10. – 15.10.03). It is an opportunity to witness the Cinema Premiere of the films “Musicians”, "Paradjanov" and “On the old Roman Road”, as well as his earlier feature films and documentaries.

The retrospective will present the following films:

In the course of the CINE DAYS 2003, we are part of the two week long initiative to promote the European cinematographic heritage all over the continent.

Don Askarian has only recently been honored with a retrospective by the Harvard Film Archive and received the Golden Camera for his life-time achievement in cinema by the Art Film Festival. He is acclaimed to be one of the most important contemporary film directors and has lived and worked in Germany, Holland and Armenia, in all of which he owns a film production company.

There will be a press-screening and press conference on the 2nd of October in the Kant Kinos, Berlin. An additional press screenings of "Musicians" and "On the Old Roman Road" will be hosted by the Acud Cinema, Berlin, on the 16th of September at 1.30 pm.
 

On the 10th of Octobre, an exhibition of photographs by Don Askarian will take place in the Kant Kinos. It features about 30 pieces of work by the Berlin-based artist.

There will be additional screenings in the follwing cities:

For further information on Don Askarian and his work please go to www.don-askarian.am
Askarian Film, Niebuhrstr.69, 10629 Berlin, phone & fax: +49-30-324 60 23, mailto: askarianfilm@web.de

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Information on Don Askarian and his work

Born in Nagorno Karabakh in Stepanakert, Armenia, Don Askarian went to Moscow in 1967 and studied history and art. He worked as an assistant-director and film critic for a year after his study. In 1978 he emigrated from USSR to West Berlin. For the last 20 years he has lived and worked in Germany. He was a prize-winner at several international film festivals. He is perhaps the only director whose "purely Armenian" films have been professionally distributed and proved financially successful in Germany, Japan, the Netherlands... In 1996 Don Askarian published his book “The Dangerous Light”.

A lot of film festivals and institutions have honoured Don Askarian’s oeuvre with retrospectives and special screenings, so that a broad audience could experience Don Askarian’s extraordinary cinematic language.

Among the icons of cinema – since Tarkovski – the most beautiful and mysterious ones.
Peter W. Jansen

It turns out to be clearer what Dannowski meant in 1992: “Time will pass until we recognize that Don Askarian is one of the most important filmmakers of our times. His movies will take up the time they need. Finally the films will have their success not with lies and assimilations but with truth.”

Don Askarian’s films are frequently compared to those of Tarkovski and Bunuel. The critic Peter W. Jansen writes about his early films: “Like Komitas, Avetik is an almost silent film. The actors resemble figures on gothic icons.” That’s why Jansen names the Armenian director an ‘icon-maker’ whose cinematic language is both, Christian and heathen.

In his films Don Askarian creates moving images by utmost precision. For him making movies is not a pseudo-artistic or chaotic process but an exact transcription of reality into pictures. “The work of an artist can be more precise than the work of a nuclear physicist.” Don Askarian: “Everything on screen makes up its own life. Many things lie around, and objects, unimportant for everyday life, can become an enormous, nearly atomic power in the autonomous world of the cinematographic.”

The Harvard Film Archive:
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 travelled to Moscow to study history and art and worked as an assistant film director and film critic before being imprisoned in 1975. Immigrating 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.
 

The Bear

One day the landlord Smirnov demands the widow Popova to pay an old debt, which her husband left. She has no money at home and begs Smirnov to wait. The polite conversation turns quickly into an argument. Popova fetches the pistols. Smirnov realizes now that he’s in love with Popova. He confesses his love.

Komitas

The monk Soghomon Soghomonian, known as Komitas, was a renowned Armenian composer and conductor who became a symbol of Armenian cultural unity through his orchestral and choral performances and his late nineteenth-century travels throughout the countryside, in which he collected peasant songs for generations eager to preserve their cultural heritage. In 1915, however, the musician’s career ended abruptly after a nervous breakdown precipitated by the Ottoman Empire’s devastation of an estimated three-fourths  of  the  country’s  population.  Wracked  with  pain  and  subjected  to   the

abuses of nineteenth-century psychiatric hospitals, Komitas  lost his mind   and withdrew into his own world of tortured memories for more than twenty years. Director Askarian dedicates his beautifully constructed, ambitious, and impressionistic portrait of Komitas to those who lost their lives.

The Harvard Film Archive, 2002

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Avetik

Hovering between the realms of poetry and history, this stunningly photographed, elegiac work -shot mostly in long takes- mixes cryptic metaphor and fantastic symbolism to tell the story of Avetik, an Armenian filmmaker exiled in Berlin. […] In sensuous, lyric tableaux, Askarian explores German racism, the 1915 Armenian genocide, the disastrous earthquake of 1989, tranquil childhood memories, and images inspired by erotic medieval poetry.

The Harvard Film Archive, 2002

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Paradjanov

Drawing on archival footage, fragments of interviews, and scenes from his films, this newly constructed portrait of Sergei Paradjanov was composed by the highly accomplished Armenian director Don Askarian. "The year is 1989. The place is the film festival in Rotterdam. Farewell at the Hilton Hotel. And Paradjanov says, ‘Help me make Confession.’ I answer, ‘As a child of two fathers, the film will be born a bastard.’ The Harvard Film Archive, 2002

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The Musicians

Folk-musicians earn their money on the streets of Armenian capital Yerevan, the ropewalkers dance in front of the old monastery Khor-Virap. Their improvisations appear like a poetic mirror for the psychical sensitivity of Armenians.

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On The Old Roman Road

Levon, an Armenian emigrant in Rotterdam, remembers his childhood in Turkey: love, political brutality. A bloody comedy. Also a modern crime story about Armenian terrorists and Turkish secret agents, about Kurds tragedy

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At the moment he is finishing the full-length film: San-Lazzaro