Author: Khondkarian Raffi

Writer-director-actor Michael A. Goorjian crafts a timely metaphor for displacement in Armenia’s shortlisted Oscar entry.

The movie’s dreamlike prologue follows a young Armenian boy escaping the brutality of the Ottoman Army during World War I, peering out of a tiny hole in an ornate luggage trunk. The interior of this box is embossed with the serene image of Mount Ararat which, while located in modern Turkey, holds deep significance as a national symbol for the Armenian people. Decades later, this boy — now a middle-aged Poughkeepsie local, “Charlie” Bakhchinyan (Goorjian) — takes advantage of Joseph Stalin’s program to repatriate displaced Armenians, but stumbles headfirst into a Soviet family comedy of sorts, though he’s none the wiser.

After assisting the disgruntled Armenian wife of a high-ranking Soviet official, brewing jealousies and crossed wires lead to Charlie — who’s fluent in English, speaks scattered Armenian and knows not a lick of Russian — being locked up for the crime of wearing a polka dotted tie. Before long, his daily routine involves stale bread, hard labor and propping himself up at his window to gaze into the small but humble home of one of his prison guards, echoing his defining childhood event, as though he were doomed to live life at a remove and view it through a pinhole. However, what begins as mere entertainment for Charlie eventually blossoms into a portrait of cultural isolation, as he slowly picks up on bits of Armenian culture and customs from afar.

As Charlie (who the prison guards nickname “Charlie Chaplin”), Goorjian brings a robust comedic energy to the screen. He would feel at home in a film by Jacques Tati as he creates humor through his physicality, warping the fabric of any scene the moment he steps into a room. His animated performance goes hand-in-hand with his initial conception of Charlie as a stereotype of an American visiting another country, drawing attention through his loud brashness and his ignorance of local customs. In fact, Goorjian — an American of Armenian descent — uses this preconception of Americanness to create a hapless, helpless protagonist whose unbridled optimism seems naive, before he unwraps the character layer by layer, revealing him to be defiantly hopeful in spite of adversity. Though comical at the outset, his performance ends up soulful and devastating. When Charlie grows thinner and more gaunt, an unspoken element of the drama is whether or not he’ll be able to hold on to the glimmer of light in his eyes.

Goorjian gives that light physical form through his filmmaking. His story is born through the back-and-forth cutting between Goorjian’s own subtle, distinctly “cinematic” performance — in which his eyes reflect comfy living-room lights in the distance — and the stage-like gesticulations of Hovik Keuchkerian and Narine Girgoryan, who play the bickering Armenian couple whose daily life becomes Charlie’s soap opera. The very act of looking becomes enrapturing, as though “Amerikatsi” were a film about the magic of movies (à la “Cinema Paradiso”) but with the projector and the silver screen stripped away.

Eventually, the two opposing modes of visual storytelling at its core (one distinctly intimate, the other distant and observational) come into explosive contact like matter and antimatter, as the idea of art metaphorically gazing back at its viewer takes distinctly literal form. It’s a moment that not only twists the screws of Goorjian’s zany plot, but feels like lightning as it unfolds, a tonal oscillation mirrored by composer Andranik Berberyan’s constant use of both upbeat comedic jazz and wistful Armenian folk.

If there’s criticism to be lobbied at Amerikatsi it’s that it remains mostly unconcerned with the brutality wrought upon Charlie and his fellow prisoners, or with the psychology of its numerous Armenian guards who oppress their kinsmen at the state’s behest. Instead, it remains tethered to Charlie’s perspective (often to a fault). And while holding back on these more rigorous explorations allows it to blossom as a “feel-good” film about atrocity (in the vein Roberto Benigni’s “Life is Beautiful”), Goorjian also employs a mischievous sleight of hand when it comes to these ideas. They remain mere implications in the movie’s margins for the most part, but he causes them to come crashing down all at once, in a brief but powerful moment late into the runtime.

What might seem mawkish on paper ends up deeply affecting in practice. Like British playwright Tom Stoppard, whose recent production “Leopoldstadt” masterfully explored his connection to his Jewish-Austrian roots — and his separation from them after the Holocaust — Goorjian reaches deep into Armenian cultural memory and searches for his place within it, as an artist adrift from his family’s culture and homeland, forced to peer at it and learn about it from a distance. He even dedicates the film to his grandfather, a survivor of the 1915 genocide, thus framing the story as an intimate fantasy of reclaiming the parts of himself which were ripped from his hands long before he was born. In the few moments his history and culture finally feel within reach, “Amerikatsi” overflows with nostalgia and unabashed tenderness. A balm for even the most hardened souls.

• Production: (Republic of Armenia) A Variance Films release of a People of AR Production, in association with Palodeon Pictures, H&H Films, AnEva Prods., the National Cinema Center of Armenia. Producers: Patrick Malkassian, Sol Tryon, Arman Nshanian. Executive producers: Patrick Malkassian, Serj Tankian, Vartan Barsoumian.
• Crew: Director, writer: Michael Goorjian. Camera: Ghasem Ebrahimian. Editor: Michael Goorjian, Mike Selemon. Music: Andranik Berberyan. Songs: Miqayel Voskanyan.
• With: Michael Goorjian, Hovik Keuchkerian, Nelli Uvarova, Mikhail Trukhin, Narine Gigoryan, Jean-Pierre Nshanian, Aram Karakhanyan, George Hovakimyan. (English, Russian, Armenian dialogue)

Ameeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council was held in St. Petersburg on December 25. During the meeting, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan made remarks about his country's position on the separation of economic and political issues, according to Azatutyun.

The head of the Armenian government says that "the Eurasian Economic Union is an economic association that should not have a political, let alone a geopolitical agenda."

"We continue to perceive it in this way and develop interaction within the framework of our economic cooperation in this context, seeking to stop all attempts to politicize Eurasian integration," Pashinyan says.

According to him, the EAEU and its economic principles should not correlate with political ambitions.

"The EAEU and its economic principles should not be associated with political ambitions. The fundamental freedoms of trade and integration cannot and should not be restricted for political reasons, as this will lead to corrosion of the fundamental principles of the association," the Prime Minister says.

In contrast to Pashinyan, Russian and Belarusian dictators Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko regularly advocate the politicization of all associations in the post-Soviet space.

Deterioration of Armenia's relations with Russia and Belarus

The Armenian authorities have repeatedly expressed their dissatisfaction with the lack of effective support for the Collective Security Treaty Organization in the framework of international cooperation among its member states. In particular, the last such complaint about the presence of Russian military bases on the territory of the country was expressed by Armenia during active hostilities in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The CSTO members are Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

In the summer, Armenia refused to participate in the Skela-2023 exercise in Belarus under the auspices of the Collective Security Treaty Organization.

At the end of October, it became known that the Armenian authorities were considering closing down Russian state TV channels because they had committed violations.

In early November, the Russian Federation stated that it perceived Armenia's participation in the Ukrainian peace formula summit in Malta as a "demonstrative anti-Russian gesture."

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/armenian-prime-minister-rebukes-putin-and-lukashenko-at-summit-in-russia/ar-AA1m3l7f