Avetisyan’s films Broken Childhood (2013), screened at the film market of the 66th Cannes Film Festival, and Tevanik (2014), co-produced with Lithuania and translated into 9 languages, depict the lives of children and teenagers during the Karabakh conflict. His latest film, again made in collaboration with Western countries, Gate to Heaven, 2019, is also about Karabakh. Since I have not seen these films (although I can take a guess as to the director’s approach), I will not be reflecting on them.
Meanwhile, the director’s feature film The Last Inhabitant, a 2016 collaboration between Lithuania, Sweden, Lebanon, US, and Armenia, is available online.
The Last Inhabitant is set in 1988-89, at the very beginning of the Karabakh conflict. In the story, Armenian inhabitants of one of the Azerbaijani villages are leaving the place. Only the bricklayer Abgar (Alexander Khachatryan) remains in the village. He does not want to leave until he finds his daughter Yurga (Sandra Dauksaite-Petrulene)…
The Last Inhabitant is a film adaptation of Armenian writer Tsovinar Khachatryan’s story “The Last Inhabitant of Gurdjevan”. Gurdjevan, located in Agsu District, is now known as Khanbulag. According to Wikipedia, Armenian families came to this village in the 18th century from the present-day Gurjaani Municipality in Georgia and named the village Gurjevan after the region where they came from. At one time, this village was home to some of the Meskhetian Turks exiled from Georgia to Central Asia and expelled from Uzbekistan in 1989.
The synopsis mentions that the story is based on true events. However, the author of the story Khachatryan says in an interview with Armenian websites: “There was an Armenian with a mentally ill daughter in that village. The director asked me to expand this story”. This means that Abgar’s daughter’s husband being murdered before her eyes and her being tortured are artistic license. According to historian Tural Hamid, a researcher of the Karabakh war, there are no records of any murders of Armenians in Khanbulag.
Although Avetisyan said, commenting on the film to local and foreign press, that “take the story out of Armenian reality, and we get universal human values,” the interpretation he offers is largely a reflection of his views.
One of the main characters, villager Ibrahim (Homayoun Ershadi), has been Abgar’s neighbor for many years, and both of them are Soviet-era people. Ibrahim promises to find Abgar’s daughter, and in return Abgar has to help the Azerbaijanis build a mosque. Ibrahim brings his daughter Yurga from Baku psychiatric hospital with injuries. Abgar agrees to help build the mosque.
Although Ibrahim is portrayed as a relatively positive character, compared to Abgar he is pathetic and cowardly. Abgar, on the other hand, despite being surrounded by enemies, is brave, courageous and has not lost his humanity. The director shows these qualities of his in various situations. For example, Azerbaijani soldiers treat him in an insulting manner, but Abgar looks them in the face without fear. He is even so “fearless” that in the final scenes he stays to face the tanks on his own, having entrusted Ibrahim to take his daughter across the border.
Or Azerbaijani children vandalize his house, using it as a playground, scaring his sick daughter. But Abgar is merciful, the children’s act of vandalism does not exhaust the patience of the wise old man; he shows concern for the Azerbaijani children, saying, “Hungry dogs could eat you!” Then, seeing the destroyed house, Abgar grieves and, talking to his wife’s soul, delivers a heart-wrenching monologue about how tidy, house-proud, hard-working she was. Through similar situations, under the mask of humanism and tolerance, Avetisyan shows that Armenians are superior to Azerbaijanis in everything; Armenians are clean, civilized, merciful, brave, while Azerbaijanis are filthy and cruel vandals. That is why actors playing Azerbaijani soldiers make exaggerated facial expressions in order to show our immorality and cruelty towards civilians. And the Azerbaijani girl working at the telephone switchboard is shown as a woman of easy virtue.
Avetisyan’s Armenian narcissism does not end there. Like most Armenian directors, he appeals to religion. The savage, ruthless husband of Ibrahim’s daughter Rebecca (Anne Bedian) expects her to produce an heir, but her children all die in infancy. Ibrahim’s mother advises her son that in order for the child to survive, it needs to be touched by a Christian hand and given a Christian name. This is supposedly an ancient belief of Azerbaijanis. Of course, Ibrahim turns to Abgar, and the kind-hearted Armenian does not reject his plea. Thus, Abgar is also elevated to the level of a forgiving martyr saint.
In the dialogue between Ibrahim and Abgar in the final scenes, Avetisyan “shames” the Azerbaijani. It goes something like this.
Ibrahim:
“Soon you will go to heaven, to your family, you will be reunited with them.”
Abgar looks at him somewhat scornfully:
“Heaven is the place where you are born. I wonder if there is a nation that has not lost the place where it came to be.”
Here Ibrahim looks at him guiltily and almost begs him to break bread with him one last time.
Oh, I completely forgot. There is a scene where Abgar suddenly comes out with a tar in his hand. He strums on the tar, awakening his daughter’s memories of the past, trying to heal her wounds, and in between he even manages to say: “Your grandfather played the tar better than anyone else (i.e. Azerbaijanis), do you remember?” Avetisyan talks about this in the interview: “The breaking strings of the tar are Yurga’s heart and where the hearts of thousands of Armenian women whose husbands, brothers, sons were slaughtered during the ‘genocide’ in Ottoman Turkey. Later on they committed the same atrocity in Sumgayit, Baku, Maragha.” With this he reveals his true intention: the movie is not based on universal values, but on typical Armenian paranoia.
Of course, Avetisyan does not forget about the “genocide”. When father and daughter flee the village, the camera focuses on the torn shawl on Yurga’s shoulder, and Abgar’s voice comes through the heavy fog:
“This is my grandmother Vardosh’s shawl. When the Turks invaded the village, my grandmother was five or six years old, she was wrapped in this shawl and they ran away. Now we are running again. We are saving her grandchildren.”
…In order to give the project an international flavor, the character of Yurga is written as Lithuanian. According to the story, Abgar met Yurga’s mother during World War II and raised the Lithuanian woman’s daughter as his own child.
In short, the film broadcasts: “Azerbaijanis are despicable, they are a good-for-nothing nation, they cannot even lay bricks, we kept their children safe”, and other such negative messages.
One of the producers of the film, Lithuanian Kestutis Drazdauskas, who actively collaborates with Armenians, said in an interview that if Azerbaijanis find the courage to watch The Last Inhabitant, then “it is our success”. He was probably inviting us to face the alleged “injustices we have committed” in our own world.
The film is in Armenian and Azerbaijani (the actors speak Azerbaijani with a very thick accent). Although this caused a negative reaction among Armenian viewers, the director argued that it was important from the point of view of historical reality.
Screened at festivals in Italy, Canada, Finland, China and other countries, the film features a number of foreign actors alongside Armenian ones. The Azerbaijani, Ibrahim, is played by the famous Iranian actor Homayoun Ershadi. Our audience knows him best from Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, the film that won the main prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. The role of Rebecca is played by Armenian-American actress Anne Bedian. Filming took place in the village of Khachmach in Khojaly District. One of the sponsors of the film is Bako Sahakyan, who is currently incarcerated in Baku.
