Your Namak for Friday, April 29
Pregnant woman fatally struck by Armenian prime minister's convoy, U.S. urges Azerbaijan to apply restraint in Nagorno-Karabakh, and opposition protests heat up across Armenia.
Hi there, here’s your weekly briefing of Armenian news in English, curated, reported and fact-checked by journalists Astrig Agopian and Maral Tavitian.
Pregnant Woman Fatally Struck by Prime Minister’s Convoy
On April 26, a pregnant woman was fatally struck by a police vehicle accompanying the Armenian Prime Minister’s motorcade in Yerevan. The incident prompted widespread shock and outrage on social media, along with heartfelt tributes from people who knew and worked with the young woman. The victim was 28-year-old Sona Mnatsakanyan, co-founder of the clean tech company Zevit and founding member of Support Our Heroes, a non-profit dedicated to supporting the development of Nagorno-Karabakh.
United States Urges Azerbaijan to Apply Restraint in Nagorno-Karabakh
United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken said his country opposes “unilateral” actions by Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh. In a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 26, Blinken said he has been “very actively and directly engaged” with Armenian and Azerbaijani leadership to help advance a long-term peaceful settlement of the conflict. “We’ve been trying to push back on any unilateral actions, particularly by Azerbaijan, that would only inflame the situation, and we have a number of programs in place that are part of the budget to try to help advance more peaceful prospects,” he said.
Opposition Protests Heat Up Across Armenia
Demonstrators calling for the resignation of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan held protests across Armenia this week, in preparation for a rally scheduled on May 1 in Yerevan. As part of the “decentralized” series of actions, members of Armenia’s parliamentary opposition groups have embarked on marches from various rural regions toward the capital. The demonstrations come in response to recent remarks by Pashinyan that many in the Armenian public interpreted as signaling his willingness to cede control of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan.
Arnaud Khayadjanian: Meet a French-Armenian filmmaker exploring Armenian identities through documentaries and fiction
“Armenian identity is such an important theme in my work because I was not connected to that part of me for the first 20 years of my life, and now I am catching up.”
Arnaud Khayadjanian has a calm presence and soft voice. When he is not on set, the young filmmaker is usually sitting at a café in Paris, writing and reviewing his notes. When he finds something inspiring, you can guess it by the sudden spark in his eyes.
Born in 1987 in the French city of Valence, Arnaud did not have many links with his Armenian heritage during the first 20 years of his life. “I knew I have the family name that I have because my grandfather, who was born in Syria, right after the genocide, was Armenian and had moved to France in the 1920s, and that’s pretty much it,” he says.
Valence is an important hub for the Armenian community in France, after Marseille, Lyon and Alfortville. But Arnaud never felt like he belonged. “I did not speak the language, had not been to Armenia, did not go to church, I did not think of myself as Armenian until I reached my 20s and started asking my family questions about our past,” Arnaud says.
At the same time as when he started questioning his Armenian heritage, he realized he did not enjoy his communications studies and would rather study film. “I moved to Paris, took cinema theory classes and started watching two or three films a day,” he says. “On the side, I wrote and learned how to actually make films on my own, by just filming some stuff with my friends.”
Arnaud’s first film “Stony Paths” (2015) was a documentary that brought to the screen his personal exploration of his origins. In the film, he highlights the history of his family’s exodus during the genocide. All he knew was that his great grandfather survived thanks to a Turk who helped him.
Through interviews with his family member and a trip to Eastern Turkey, he shares the story of “the Righteous,” Turkish and Kurdish peoples who saved the lives of Armenians during the genocide. With him, we see people who now live there –– those who know what happened and others who really have no idea. Those who still deny the genocide, and the ones who acknowledge it.
Arnaud has been living in Paris for a decade now, but travels to Armenia often, and makes most of his projects about Armenians.
“Armenian identity is such an important theme in my work because I was not connected to that part of me for the first 20 years of my life, and now I am catching up,” he says.
In “We are our mountains” (2017), he filmed residents of Nagorno-Karabakh immediately after the Four Day War in 2016. Now that the region experienced another war in 2020, the film adopted a new meaning for Arnaud.
“All the people I filmed lost someone during the war. And some of the places I went to, Armenians have lost now,” Arnaud says. “So I realized my footage also has a sort of archive value now and also that’s why it’s so important that we tell the stories of our community, that we film ourselves, so that it is not lost.”
The French influence on Arnaud’s work is also important –– the filmmaker has a very realist, almost raw style, be it in his documentaries or fictions.
Arnaud does not speak Armenian, despite several attempts to take classes in Western and Eastern dialects. “It’s such a difficult language, I have to admit I struggle and I am still not able to grasp it,” he says. But the filmmaker features people who speak Armenian in his documentaries, thanks to the help of fixers and translators.
For his latest fiction projects, he even writes in French and then asks his actors to translate in Armenian. “I then have a translator on set to verify that they say the right words, and for the acting in itself, somehow thanks to the music of the Armenian language I still manage to know when they sound right and when they don’t,” Arnaud says.
In his latest film, “Anahide,” which has not been publicly released yet, Arnaud explores the transmission of Armenian identity in the French diaspora. The film tells the story of a young French-Armenian woman who wants to get a tattoo related to her Armenian identity, and of her father’s reaction. It explores the father-daughter relationship, loss, being a child of an immigrant. “It’s a topic that is so specifically Armenian, but so universal at the same time,” he says.
The filmmaker does not shy away from taboo topics either. At the moment he is developing two future projects about selective abortion and the drafting process for military service in Armenia.
“I think cinema, and fiction in this case, are a good tool to address these painful but important questions for the Armenian communities to grow,” he says.
To listen: Im Khorodig Yar (My sweet beloved), a truly sweet rendition of an Armenian wedding folk song from Sasun, performed by Armenian-American a cappella trio Zulal.
To read: Armenia’s Culinary History Hides in a Museum’s Manuscripts, a fascinating article about the roots of Armenian cuisine, as revealed through centuries-old documents tucked away in Yerevan’s Matenadaran.
To watch: Stony Paths, a documentary by Arnaud Khayadjanian about his quest to uncover the story of his ancestors. The film tells the story of “the Righteous,” Turkish and Kurdish peoples who saved Armenian lives during the genocide.
That’s it for today, see you next week!
Questions? Story ideas? An urge to say barev/parev? You can send us a secure email at namaknews@protonmail.com.