We hear a lot about the war in Ukraine 🇺🇦 but very little about the war in Armenia. Here is a film about the 1992 war and it’s effects on Russian speaking Armenians.
This was not a war about urban elites from from Kiev … it is more about people from a poor rural existence.
The Minsk group was set up during this war to try to find a resolution to the conflict described in ‘the lighthouse’.
It was the same Minsk group which proposed a resolution for the conflict in Ukraine. The Minsk protocol was signed by the participants in 2014 after after conflict broke out between Ukraine the Ukrainian government and the Eastern Donblas region of Ukraine. A resolution that was rejected.
Set in the early 1990s, The Lighthouse follows Lena (Ana Kapaleva) as she returns from Moscow to the small Armenian village of her upbringing to convince her grandparents to flee the approaching war. Lena’s homecoming is also a return to the innocence of her childhood – delineated by the ever-present swirling mists that seem to encompass the village. Despite the growing threat of armed conflict, her life and those of the villagers continue with almost somnambulist rhythms amid the gathering clouds of war.
An intimate, elegiac journey into the haze of personal memory and collective history, Russian-Armenian director Maria Saakyan’s debut feature marked the arrival of a unique voice in modern Eastern European cinema. While Saakyan’s life and career were cut tragically short due to her untimely death at the age of 37, her unique expressionistic lens lives on through this powerful cinematic work.
