Un/Filmed Workshop in Yerevan, Armenia
Un/Filmed is an international online documentary film school for Russian speaking students, the result of a partnership with the Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute at Indiana University, the Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina Vanden Heuvel Fund, and the NGO Yerevan Laboratory for Social and Cultural Research.
In July 2023, Un/Filmed convened online and in-person in Yerevan, Armenia. Five Russian-speaking participants came from Moscow, Chita, Belgrade, Warsaw, and Istanbul to work together and collaborate with five early-career Armenian filmmakers. 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. 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 Un/Filmed 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. This innovative project of international collaborative filmmaking is intended to take on decolonizing approach to documentary filmmaking. As a result, during this one-week workshop, five documentary short films were created, including ones about refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh). These films were publicly screened in Yerevan at the end of the workshop.