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| Reviews - English | |
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'Avetik' is an inspired look at the Armenian genocide by
Desmond Ryan In the Inspired and deeply tragic vision of Don Askarian,
the agonizing fate of the Armenian people In this century can be presented
as a paradox: Things of beauty become images of something that will be a
sorrow forever. In Avetik
and Komitas, to be screened at
the festival on Saturday, the Armenian director views the systematic
genocide that claimed two million lives between 1915 and 1920 from slightly different perspectives but with the same
general method. Disdaining linear narrative and even obvious connections
between individual scenes, Askarian constructs contrasts of the ordinary
and the grotesque, the natural and the abominable. Experiencing his highly
original conceptions is more like watching a painter and a poet at work
than a director. In Avetik, the sensuous, often lyric imagery is
interrupted by rumination a catastrophe that still resonates after six
decades and the guilt of the survivors.
'Nagorny Karabakh': Depicting dirty truth of 'ethnic cleansing' By
Desmond Ryan Nagorny
Karabakh: The Third and Fourth Volume of the Armenian History, a documentary
about the suffering of the Armenian minority in Azerbaijan, is the most
straightforward of the three films in the Philadelphia Festival of World
Cinema by director Don Askarian. Askarian, an Armenian who lives in exile in Berlin,
prefers to work with powerful and lyric images rather than narrative.
Here, he has assembled smuggled video footage that recounts torture, rape
and murder. "Ethnic cleansing," that appalling entry into
the political vocabulary of the ‘90s, is here depicted in flesh and blood
- with the emphasis on the latter.
The conflict may seem parochial and remote, but the testimony in Nagorny
Karabakh reflects pain that is being felt in many parts of the world.
"There's the North American premiere of Avetik,
from Don Askarian
- a brilliant Armenian filmmaker. He's an incredibly
accomplished cinematic voice." By Steven Rea The Philadelphia Inquirer |
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