YEREVAN (Armenia) 

Workshop:  16.09 - 04.10.2013  

Tutors: Jacek Bławut, Marcel Łoziński, Vita Żelakeviciute

Partners:  Yerevan State Institute of Theatre and Cinematography, The Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Yerevan

Workshops took place at the Yerevan State Institute of Theatre and Cinema from 16 September - 4 October 2013. The Polish team was made up of: Marcel Łoziński, Jacek Bławut and Vita Żelakeviciute, and also the editor, Katarzyna Boniecka; production manager Victoria Ogneva and assistant cinematographer Vahram Mkhitaryan. The workshops’ participants were enthusiastic 3rd-and 4th-year students at the Institute of Theatre and Cinema, mainly majoring in directing and cinematography. The school’s Rector, Armen Mazmanyan, extended great hospitality and organisational help, supported by the Armenian project coordinator, lecturer Anush Kocharyan, and Anahit Khachatryan, the rector’s assistant. The tutors found the Yerevan film students extremely mature and hardworking. The last few years, which have been difficult for Armenian economic and political terms, have left their mark on the people and the capital. During the selection of documentary subjects by the participants an acute contrast was apparent between material privation, the daily struggle for survival and the difficulties of these struggles on the one hand and pride in the great cultural traditions, a calm certainty in one’s own identity, faith in high art and its symbolic meaning on the other. Perhaps – here in Yerevan – the most poetic, the most metaphorical picture of a city will emerge, where even the story of a crane operator will be transformed into a story about the power of the imagination. Against the background of a bakery, a cemetery or a street we’ll be able to observe the relationship of a master and pupil during a music lesson, a ballet lesson, or a theatre rehearsal. We’ll meet a woman painter immortalising a single element of a city landscape: roofs; but we’ll also see the meaning of a human community in the ceremonial ritual of cleaning carpets.