|
35 mm, 1:1.66, 96 min, color and b/w, Prizes: Interfilm-Jury-Price - Max-Ophuls-Price Fest.'89; 6 Gold-Medals - Film Festival Venice '88; Prizewinner at Riga Film Festival '90. Prints in English, German,
French, Italian, Dutch and Japan. Sale and distribution by Don Film, |
|
|
|
SYNOPSIS The film is dedicated to the
Armenian monk and genius composer Komitas, and the 2 million victims on his
people in Turkey in 1915. |
||
|
DON ASKARIAN ON HIS FILM Guided by pain, l extend my hand and it thrusts against them. The souls of
2 million murdered circle over your and my head, over Ararat... On October 10,1984, l sat in the kitchen of our apartment in Berlin, opposite me, on the electrical fuse box, stood the angel and looked at me through the leaves of a philodendron plant, l raised my head and it was no longer there. Then they both appeared. The Harvard Film Archive about the film
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. |
||
|
CAST & CREDITS |
||
|
Komitas Terlemesian Pupil Katholikos Armenian Monk Nurse Musicians Angels |
Script writer, director Don Askarian Photography Music Art direction Editing Properties Costumes Sound effects Production management
Commissioning editors
|
|
| Home |
 |
|
