On January 19, 2020, I lost my father, Vigen Stepanyan, suddenly and brutally.
My father was an actor, both in theatre and film.
The pain caused by the death of a father is unthinkable and impossible to describe. So, I won’t attempt it. What I do know, and what I can tell, is that the grief caused by his death was all the more intense because I imagined that we still had plenty of time to talk. Now our dialogue is broken forever.
MY ARMENIAN PHANTOMS was born of this interrupted dialogue. My father’s disappearance opened the doors of the past wide for me. The Armenian past. And the past of cinema. The two intimately linked.
It was as if my father’s ghost had taken me by the hand and led me into a circle of ghosts linked, in one way or another, to the world of cinema.
As I began to enter a dialogue with his ghost, as I began to search for and collect traces of his past career, as I began to revisit the films in which he starred, I came across other ghosts from the history of Armenian cinema. It was as if my father’s ghost had taken me by the hand and led me into a circle of ghosts linked, in one way or another, to the world of cinema. Hence the desire to tell the story of this cinema, little known abroad, in a film. To offer a personal cinematic journey through the history of Armenian cinema.
A cinema organically linked to a political, social and cultural universe that has now disappeared: the Soviet Union. Indeed, Armenian cinema is closely linked to the history of the Soviet empire. It began in 1925 with NAMOUS (HONOR, dir. Hamo Bek- Nazarov), and was interrupted for over ten years after the filming of KAROT (NOSTALGIA, dir. Frunze Dovlatian, 1990), when the USSR was dismantled and Armenia, after 70 years, once again became an independent nation. An independent nation, to be sure… but one that was nostalgic for its Soviet past. To the point of having difficulty writing its history in the present.
Born in 1982, I myself am a child of the Soviet Union. At school, I was taught Russian and Communist values. In the scouts, I passionately aspired to be a “pioneer” (according to the Soviet terminology that structured and hierarchized scout clans) and, when the USSR was dismantled, I felt an intense frustration when I realized that I would never be... “a pioneer”! Like many children in Eastern Europe and Eurasia who experienced both the Soviet Union and its aftermath, I harbored ambivalent feelings towards the Communist system: a mixture of rejection and hidden, almost shameful admiration.
When the USSR collapsed and Armenia became independent, my parents left the country. They returned to live there. I did not. I’ve lived abroad all my life since then.
Tamara Stepanyan
