“The zigzag scissor is unhealthy,” 12-year-old Vrej winces, the nape of his neck inches from the blade. “It’s hurting me.”
That reluctant recipient of “a real man’s haircut” can also be the delicate hero of My Candy Land (2024), Sareen Hairabedian’s first documentary characteristic, which follows an ethnic Armenian household through the Second Artsakh Struggle. Because the movie unfolds, Vrej, the eldest of three, transforms from a flower-picking dreamer who needs his personal pigeon to a veritable soldier in coaching. “There are such a lot of unhealthy issues taking place now,” he sighs to the digital camera, fiddling his arms exterior the house that he shares with displaced kinfolk. “Within the historic occasions, elephants have been used as tanks, and stones have been used like slingshots. However when weapons have been invented, worse occasions have begun.”
Hairabedian stays out of the body all through the documentary, directing our consideration to Vrej’s lived expertise and pensive rumination, from his joyful visits to his grandma’s home down the highway to his household’s demoralizing discovery that, after the battle’s ceasefire, virtually 75% of the Republic of Artsakh (additionally identified by the Russian title Nagorno-Karabakh) has been ceded to Azerbaijan. Properly conscious that the “candy land” he calls house — the mountainous enclave of Tsaghkashen — was contested many years earlier than his delivery, Vrej weighs his aversion to violence towards his rising sense of nationalism, and the sensation that there isn’t any different possibility.
As soon as the household has returned to their embattled village, the stress to militarize is inescapable. Vrej’s child brother binge-watches a nationalist music video from a smartphone, singing alongside to the chorus a couple of younger man dying for his folks. Utilizing the detritus round his battle-scarred village, Vrej whittles a makeshift wood rifle. His grade college initiates a “kindergarten for the military,” coaching impish tweens to strap on a gasoline masks in beneath 5 seconds. Hairabedian’s digital camera lingers on the anxious trainees who’re transported to a kiddie boot camp — girls and boys who’ve barely hit puberty anticipated to defend what’s left of their homeland within the occasion of one other assault. As they march in unison in ersatz Nike and FILA streetwear and different vestiges of Western imperialism, we should reckon with the extent to which American ignorance — and indifference — to the battle is one other aspect impact of supposedly “profitable” the Chilly Struggle.
By the tip of the movie, Vrej has misplaced his boyish marvel and ambitions of changing into a dentist. When his mom lights the candles on his thirteenth birthday cake, he stoically blows it out. “Am I going to die?” he asks the director within the last scene, staring off into the mountains that encompass his village. “That’s what occurs in movies, the principle hero dies ultimately.”
Ultimately credit, we be taught that Vrej’s household was among the many 1000’s pressured to flee their ancestral land when, in 2023, Azerbaijan launched one more navy assault. This occasion proves to be the surprising turning level of There Was, There Was Not (2024), Emily Mkrtichian’s documentary, which follows 4 ethnic Armenian ladies who name Artsakh house. The place My Candy Land reveals the best way that the battle robs boys of their childhoods, There Was, There Was Not not directly exposes the fraught relationship between feminist solidarity and nationalist zeal.
In contrast to Hairabedian, Mkrtichian foregrounds her participation within the movie. “My grandparents have been pressured to flee their Indigenous homelands,” she relays in a voiceover whereas brewing a cup of conventional Armenian espresso. “A lot of what I knew got here from delusion and story… conjuring up a spot that felt very actual.” Mixing the fairy tales of her youth with the brutal actuality of at the moment, There Was, There Was Not presents Artsakh as each a sun-swept “paradise” and a bastion of patriarchal management as ladies throughout ages and professions categorical the depth of their collective connection to their homeland in addition to their various responses to the sexism that dominates their tradition.
Sosé Balasanyan, 33, is a world-class judoist and martial arts instructor who goals of profitable an Olympic gold medal. Freelance journalist Siranush Sargsyan, 39, decides to run for metropolis council, and distributes flyers across the capital, Stepanakert. “I made a decision to run as a result of we want ladies in workplace,” she tells a skeptical citizen. “Your magnificence will save the world,” responds one other man, amused. Sveta Harutyunyan is a 40-something mom of three daughters, and one in every of few ladies employed to disable landmines remaining from the First Artsakh Struggle of the late Eighties to ’90s. Probably the most outspoken of all the ladies is human rights activist Gayane Hambardzumyan, founding father of Artsakh’s solely Girls’s Heart to assist these escaping home abuse.
The toughness and resilience of the ladies goes with out saying, however Mkrtichian excels at revealing their character as people. When she’s not pulling chin-ups in a close-by discipline, Sosé exhibits off her assortment of stuffed animals. Siranush basks in her reflection after a blow-out, then hustles to end up the vote. Sveta retains her nails completely manicured, regardless of manually combing the minefields. Gayane gushes at her grandkids after sharing an array of “Smash the Patriarchy” postcards she was forbidden to hold in public.
By the point battle breaks out, viewers ought to have a robust sense of what’s at stake: an advanced, distinctive society the place ladies are without delay confined to conventional roles and rallying for a brighter tomorrow. Like Hairabedian, Mkrtichian doesn’t inform us the best way to really feel or what to do when, by the tip of the movie, the Republic of Artsakh ceases to exist. As a substitute, the ladies’s tales alert us to how fragile so many homelands proceed to be — how susceptible to displacement and ethnic cleaning, how proof against fast and tidy options — whereas each movies deliver Artsakh’s historical past to the eye of the USA and different audiences with little or no data of this embattled territory.
“Show to me that we exist as a rustic,” Vrej’s grade college instructor implores. His fast response is, “As a result of we exist.” Even dedicated pacifists would possibly waver if our house was beneath relentless assault from exterior forces. For each of those movies, that’s exactly the purpose.
My Candy Land (2024) is screening on the Amman Worldwide Movie Competition in numerous places in Amman, Jordon on July 4 and 6, and on the Moscow Cinema as a part of the Golden Apricot Movie Competition in Yerevan, Armenia, on July 12. There Was, There Was Not, directed by Emily Mkrtichian, is screening at choose unbiased theaters.