In July 2023 five Russian-speaking graduates of the Un/Filmed online school for documentary filmmaking were selected and paired with five early-career filmmakers from Armenia. All participants met in Yerevan, Armenia for one week right after Azerbaijan took control over Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) and its Armenian population fled to central Armenia. During the workshop the participants developed, filmed and edited short documentaries and explored topics such as post-Soviet transformation, military conflicts in the region, relations of the former Soviet republics with Russia and the impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the war in Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh). The workshop (online and offline in Yerevan) was led by Viktor Ilyukhin, a producer and founder of the Un/Filmed school, Askold Kurov, a documentary filmmaker, Anastasia Patlay, a documentary theater director, Yura Boguslavsky, documentary animation director.
After preparation for filming and presenting their film projects online, the workshop participants met in Yerevan to make their short documentaries and attend classes led by the workshop instructors. Russian-speaking participants came from Moscow, Chita, Belgrade, Warsaw, and Istanbul to work together and collaborate with the Armenian filmmakers. The workshop in Yerevan was scheduled on September 25-October 1, 2023, and when participants met in Yerevan, they had to revise their preliminary developed projects because of the Azerbaijan’s “military operation” in Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) when almost a hundred thousand Armenians fled Artsakh. The workshop participants decided that working on films would be the best way to understand and document what was happening in Armenia at that time, telling stories of people who have experienced the war, lost their homes and family members. The themes of war and loss, search for a new home, freedom and resistance have become the key themes for the young filmmakers from Russia and Armenia. This workshop also gave them a unique opportunity to collaborate, creating films together and to better understand both countries’ histories and cultures, and the obstacles both countries faced in the attempts to achieve peace and freedom after the Soviet Union’s collapse. The workshop in Yerevan was designed as a collaborative project where Russian and Armenian participants interact and learn from each other, exchanging ideas and sharing their stories to build a community of young documentary filmmakers who now live in different countries despite the political tensions between their governments. It’s a truly innovative project of international collaborative filmmaking and we wanted to take on decolonizing approach to documentary filmmaking, coming to Armenia and to find a way to understand the narratives of the Armenian people through collaboration with the Armenian filmmakers and to create a shared emotional experience for the participants as well as a space to reflect on both similar and different processes in Russian and Armenian’ societies. Russia’s war against Ukraine and the humanitarian crisis in Artsakh are constantly present in all projects, shadowing all stories and defining the filmmakers’ perspectives.
As a result, during this one-week workshop, five documentary short films were created, including ones about refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh), and these films were publicly screened in Yerevan at the end of the workshop. This workshop was a result of partnership with the Russian and East European Institute at Indiana University, the Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel Fund, and with the NGO Yerevan Laboratory for Social and Cultural Research.