Don Askarian

“Drawing on archival footage, fragments of interviews, and scenes from his films, this newly constructed portrait of Sergey Paradjanov was composed by the highly accomplished Armenian director Don Askarian (Komitas, Avetik). According to the director's synopsis: "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’."

In 1988 the largest demonstrations and strikes ever in the history of the Soviet Union took place in Armenia. The immediate cause for it was the demand of Nagorno Karabakh, an autonomous area in Azerbaijan, to be an administratively accounted Armenian territory.

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.

In Holland, a group of Armenian terrorists have swung into action, murdering a Turkish intelligence agent and holding his son for ransom. As the battle of wits between the terrorists and the Dutch police plays itself out, an author from Armenia living in Rotterdam finds himself following the events as he thinks back on his life in his homeland, indulging in fantasies about his past, his future, and his obsessions.

A tableaux of poetry and images exploring the historical trauma, identity, and collective memory of the Armenian people centered on an Armenian filmmaker exiled in Berlin.

The film is dedicated to the Armenian monk and genius composer Komitas, and the 2 million victims on his people in Turkey in 1915. The final 20 years of Komitas life were spent in various mental hospitals. The destiny of Komitas? This is the magic beauty of Armenian culture and the abhorrent brutality of Armenian history. A cultural and artistic world that was slaughtered with a curved knife. A humanity that doggedly advances towards an apocalyptic catastrophe, that does not recognize its own original purpose, eradicates its own memory, its final roots.

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.

Exercise in death - look at the terrible face of a father. To hear his hoarseness is the preparation for death.

This beautiful mountain saw a lot before and after the great flood.