It is Anahid Yahjian’s piece, “Domestic Demon” (2026), which opened the evening. It is a beautiful and dizzying array of pictures, arranged with a frontality that recalls Parajanov. Each shot is meticulous, ranging from the intimate, the grotesque, the bizarre, and the amusing, as Yahjian narrates the way others see her not long after giving birth to her first child.
A still from Anahid Yahjian’s “Domestic Demon”
In the middle of the event, acting as its fulcrum, was Gariné Torossian’s “Girl From Moush” (1994). It is the oldest film in the program and the shortest: six minutes of photographs and film stock hand-spliced into a homeland the filmmaker, born in Beirut and raised in Toronto, had never seen. Here, an unnamed narrator speaks to another person, narrating their experiences of being Armenian, in Armenian. She pleads her desires to have someone (anyone!) hear her words, and to acknowledge her feelings. The imagery, detached from the narration, is a series of stills of various Armenian monuments and landscapes, acting as if they were a personal home movie.
A still from Gariné Torossian’s “Girl from Moush”
“World” (2020), by Christine Haroutounian, was a masterclass in subtlety. It explores the relationship between a young, lonely woman and her dying mother. Much was unsaid between the two, yet the entire history of their relationship was deftly communicated. Similarly, Naira Sargsyan’s “General Cleaning” (2020) focuses on a specific family’s interpersonal relationships, as they clear their home and prepare for a move. The protagonist, the grandfather, is a caretaker at a graveyard, and while the film is permeated with sadness, there are moments of levity that make it feel like one is inhabiting a real Armenian home.
The last film of the evening was “Farewell” (2004) by Maria Saakyan, who trained at Moscow’s prestigious VGIK and graduated in 2003; “Farewell” is her final student work. She died of cancer in 2018, at thirty-seven, making this viewing a truly rare treat. What little dialogue that appears in the film is in Russian, but it’s not a prerequisite for enjoying the piece, which has a young child imagining the life of her recently deceased father. Saakyan spent her working life trying to build an Armenian cinema, and she is the only filmmaker here for whom “posthumous traces” is a literal description.