Filmmaker Emily Mkrtichian didn’t know she can be making a battle documentary when she launched into her near-decade-in-the-making function There Was, There Was Not. What started as a venture aiming to discover the lives of 4 disparate girls in post-conflict Artsakh modified nearly in a single day because the long-beleaguered breakaway state, sandwiched between Azerbaijan and Armenia, turned the positioning of ethnic cleaning of its majority indigenous Armenian inhabitants within the wake of a serious escalation in a dormant battle.
“All the things was completely complicated and scary,” the documentarian tells Deadline in an interview. “And at that second, I understood that the movie that we had been making was completely going to vary, nevertheless it took a number of years to know what that meant, and so I stayed by the entire 45 days of the battle.”
Towards the latter half of 2020, as worldwide borders slowly reopened, Mkrtichian was getting ready to wrap up filming on the doc. The day earlier than she was set to fly again to the U.S., the battle broke out after an Azerbaijani offensive. “It was completely a coincidence and a shock to be there with a digital camera when that was occurring,” she says.
There Was, There Was Not — which had its world premiere on the all-documentary fest True/False final yr and can proceed screening in sure U.S. cities by November following an Oct. 10 launch — takes its title from the normal introductory phrase in Armenian folks tales, the corollary to the English variant “As soon as upon a time.” With establishing pictures of the majestic Armenian highlands, the documentary makes a concerted effort to hint the deep-rooted mythos of this ancestral land earlier than delving into its topics.
“Within the years that adopted, it was actually onerous as an artist, as a filmmaker, to really feel answerable for making a narrative or making some form of that means out of that have,” Mkrtichian recollects of filming. “And for me, that have was basically witnessing Siranush, Sose, Gayane, Sveta in that unbelievable second of their lives … It took me a extremely very long time to strive to determine what it’s we’re doing after we inform tales, and the way that may nonetheless have energy, even when it looks like all of our energy has been taken away.”
The doc was born partially out of a brief movie Mkrtichian had beforehand launched in 2018, Motherland, about girls within the capital metropolis of Stepanakert who served with the HALO Belief, an NGO that works on clearing landmines and explosives in battle areas. By way of that venture, and her cut up time between Armenia, Artsakh, and the U.S., she got here to know Siranush Sargsyan, an educator-turned-freelance battle correspondent; Gayane Hambardzumyan, a feminist organizer; Sose Balasanyan, a rising judo star and world champion; and Sveta Harutunyan, a deminer with HALO.
Siranush Sargsyan in ‘There Was, There Was Not’
“The movie will not be meant to garner sympathy and for others to observe it and to think about these girls as victims,” Mkrtichian maintains, “as a result of I’ve realized a lot from these 4 girls about survival, resistance, resilience. I feel, if something, the movie is making an attempt to inform us that these girls have one thing to show us. They’re not there for us to really feel dangerous for; we will be enraged about what occurred, and we are able to perceive that it was an enormous injustice, however it’s not meant to flatten them as people.”
To that finish, Mkrtichian, as a diaspora Armenian, was cognizant of the “totally different privilege” she dropped at the fabric, selecting to floor the movie in actuality and lean away from sensationalism. As such, the director made “very intentional” decisions to incorporate moments the place she crosses the boundary between filmmaker and topic, showing on display in intimate scenes to share an embrace or supply some phrases.
“It was vital to permit one thing of the connection of myself to those girls, it was vital for the viewer to know that the particular person behind the digital camera actually cared about them,” she explains.
Moreover, Mkrtichian was eager to eschew conventions of the battle documentary subgenre, making the deliberate choice to depict the “rupture” that happens on the outset of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh Battle and breaking with the “vérité” of the movie to conduct sit-down interviews.
“Once we had been within the edit, there was plenty of discuss round — the normal model of this movie would have began with bombs, so that individuals knew that there was a battle coming and that they might keep engaged and ,” she says. “And it was a really intentional option to spend the primary 40 minutes of the movie in Artsakh, in a spot that, after all, isn’t good, as a result of all these girls had been struggling for one thing totally different, but in addition was so lovely in its personal manner.”
The ladies’s distinct and all-encompassing tie to their homeland — regardless of its conservatism and embedded misogyny, as Sargsyan factors out — is one thing Mkrtichian admits she was envious of, having “felt disconnected from the place that I grew up in.”
“Their love of Artsakh was actually palpable … I used to be, like, jealous of that,” she says. “There was one thing there that actually captivated me, that data of your connection to a spot, and with the ability to nonetheless be on it regardless of every little thing round being type of tenuous, and one way or the other that just about made you adore it extra.”
Official poster for ‘There Was, There Was Not’
In step with the wealthy Armenian custom of generational storytelling — Mkrtichian says, “I used to be raised on tales of genocide. I used to be raised on tales of, ‘Watch out, be cautious.’ I used to be raised on tales of, ‘Land is vital, household is vital.’” — the filmmaker needed to discover, by the prism of warfare, the meaning-making of oral histories.
“Experiencing the battle was nearly, to me, like experiencing this stuff that I had heard by story, and it made me take into consideration, ‘What’s the worth of those tales? Why had been they handed on to me? And why are they so vital in my childhood?’ And a part of it’s as a result of they had been passing on data, and so they had been additionally conserving one thing alive that had been misplaced to my ancestors,” she says.
The battle formally concluded Nov. 10, 2020, when Russia brokered a ceasefire settlement in favor of Azerbaijan, whose utilization of banned Israeli-made cluster bombs and different advanced munitions led to the loss of life of over 5,000. Regardless of a peacekeeping power, Azerbaijan launched a large-scale navy offensive on the sovereign territory in September 2023, which led to the displacement of almost the whole Artsakh inhabitants, some 120,000, to Armenia. Shortly thereafter, in January 2024, the disputed area was formally dissolved and the republic ceased to exist. A peace deal is at present in impact between the 2 nations.
Mkrtichian hopes her movie exists in live performance with different initiatives that provide “resistance to erasure” by way of the “work of reminiscence.”
“It feels troublesome to reside on the earth and go searching at how many individuals are being forcibly displaced from their lands,” she says. “I need [the film] to maintain [this place] alive. And I need it to actually be in solidarity with all the opposite struggles of the opposite peoples who’re combating to remain on their land, so we perceive: Why is that vital, and what’s the actual danger? There’s an actual danger of shedding these locations without end.”
(L-R) Sveta Harutunyan, Sose Balasanyan, Gayane Hambardzumyan and Siranush Sargsyan in ‘There Was, There Was Not’
For Sargsyan — who’s at present enrolled within the human rights advocacy program on the Nova College of Enterprise & Economics in Carcavelos, Portugal — shedding gentle on the understudied battle is a “lifestyle … I simply can’t not do it.”
“I used to be not heard. I used to be not seen. And I feel one of many greatest, [most] vital half[s] of this film is that it permits us to be seen,” she explains in an interview, including that the film stands in opposition to these making an attempt to “destroy your previous.”
Of combatting historic deletion, she says, “You’re feeling insecure about your previous, what you skilled there. And typically you additionally even begin to ask, like, ‘Possibly that was not actual.’”
Significantly “traumatic,” Sargsyan says, is the insinuation from different Armenians — whether or not authorities officers or civilians — that the Artsakhi populace “didn’t struggle” again onerous sufficient to guard its territory.
“We’re uncommon refugees, like we’re refugees in our nation, in our homeland,” she says of relocating to Armenia, noting “our love was unconditional to Artsakh” and “we did our greatest.”
“Now I reside in one of many [most] lovely cities on the earth [in Portugal], nevertheless it’s like a film: You might be strolling and you recognize, like, it’s not your life. It should by no means be your life,” she explains.
Regardless of the “very painful” nature of the loss, Sargsyan says Artsakhis now think about Armenia their adoptive homeland, the place the work of defending their id and historical past will proceed.
“What we had, we’ve got to maintain it, particularly after we don’t have any type of entry to Artsakh,” she states. “Each scene, each store, even each canine — I don’t know — every little thing you see in [this] film, it’s vital. For me, it’s like a museum, as a result of we are going to by no means be that manner once more. All of us modified. We aren’t the identical individuals, and we are going to by no means be in that surroundings.”