Category: 2018

Film: ReAnimania International Animation Film and Comic Art Festival winners

Boris Nahapetian
Panorama, Armenia
Nov 7 2018
Culture 15:32 07/11/2018 Armenia

The 10th ReAnimania is over, thus marking the beginning of the preparatory works for the 11th edition. For about a week ReAnmania had turned Armenia into a meeting point of the world-class and beginner animators.

This year marked ReAnimania’s 10 years, as well as the eighty-year anniversary of the Armenian animation.

The opening of the festival this year was marked by the “Heartbeats of the Animation” concert. By the way, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Armenian animation, Tigran Mansuryan, Stepan Shakaryan, Robert Amirkhanyan and Ruben Hakhverdyan were awarded by Emancipation Medal of the ReAnimania Festival for the songs and music created for Armenian animation films.

According to the festival’s press office, the festival hosted world-renowned guests such as Eric Papen, Stefan Kazantsyan, Henry Hovhannisyan and Géraldine Baché, Arthur de Pins, Corinne De Tombe, Gouryun Afrikyan, David Dutel, Vasco Sa, Regina Tesoa Abel Alvarez. They not only were jury for the films, but also conducted master classes for young animators.
More than 100 countries and about 2,000 animated films applied to participate at this year’s festival. During the festival, the audience has had the opportunity to watch over 400 films included in the five competition programs.

The festival winners:
Best feature film, “Chris from Switzerland”
Best feature film, “Another Day”
Special Prize. short film “Winning Pablo”
Best Short Film, “Weekends”
Special Prize. graduation film, “Love Me, Fear Me”
Best graduation film, “A Ghost Story”
Best TV and Educational Film, “Subjects Have No Rights”
Best musical animated video “N.A.P”
Best Armenian Animated Film, “Give Me Peace”

This year, the RA Ministry of Diaspora has also foreseen a special prize for the Armenian Diaspora participants. The winner was from Russia, Nataly Mirzoyan, with the film “5 Minutes to the Sea”.

The ReAnimania International Festival of Yerevan for the fourth year already has enabled young animators to take part in the one-month course of the animation school in Angoulême. In the memory of the painter and animator Sevan Naghashyan this year the scholarship has been renamed “ReA Sevan Naghash”. Two participants – Nane Sargsyan and Arevik Aroyan – were awarded scholarship. Winners of ReA Sevan Naghash Scholarship will be given an opportunity to travel to Angoulême animation school for a one-month training funded by ReAnimania. The French Embassy provides travel expenses, while the Naghashyan family provides money (about $ 500) to cover the living expenses of the participant. Under the terms of the competition, the participants will have to prepare a 30-second-length film for ReAnimania and conduct 4 master classes at Sevan Naghashyan Art School in Vazashen, Tavush Region.
With the support of the French Embassy in Armenia, the festival featured the best selection of French animated films.

With the support of the German Embassy in Armenia, the first feature German animated film created 92 years ago was screened, for which the embassy invited a famous pianist to play during movie.

Film: Film about devastating Armenia quake will be screened in U.S.

Hunanian Jack
PanArmenian, Armenia
Nov 7 2018
November 7, 2018 – 17:59 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net – The drama “Spitak” about the devastating earthquake that shook Armenia on December 7, 1988, will be screened in the United States, director Alexander Kott revealed in an interview with TASS.

“Spitak” is Armenia’s submission for the upcoming best foreign language film category at the Oscars.

Weighing in on his chances to take an Oscar home, Kott said the very nomination from Armenia is already a big step.

The film, according to him, will be shown in Washington, Miami, Los Angeles and New York.

The feature film is based on real events and includes stories taken from eyewitness accounts.

In the movie, the director has intentionally left scenes of horror behind the camera, focusing on the experience of the characters instead.

Kott himself has described “Spitak” as ‘a requiem film’, in which he has attempted to convey “the panic, despair, courage and heroism” of those who tried to find their home and family despite everything.

Prior to shooting, the director decided that all the heroes will speak their native languages, so the film ended up featuring Armenian, Russian and French speeches.

Culture: Touching tribute to Scot who led the way with war poetry

Emil Lazarian
The Herald (Glasgow)
November 6, 2018 Tuesday
Touching tribute to Scot who led the way with war poetry
 
by  Garry Scott
 
 
It TOOK 28 years for Neil McPherson to write It Is Easy To Be Dead, the writer and artistic director of London’s Finborough Theatre’s homage to First World War poet Charles Hamilton Sorley, which arrives in Scotland this week for a short run in Aberdeen and Glasgow following the play’s West End success.
 
McPherson’s original idea as a young actor in 1988 was to write and perform a one-man show about Sorley’s better known contemporary, Wilfred Owen. A director told McPherson there were lots of plays about Owen already, and he should do one about Sorley instead.
 
McPherson had been running the Finborough Theatre for 17 years by the time he began what would become It Is Easy To Be Dead, and programmed it as part of a season to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the war. Keen to come at things from a different angle, McPherson’s 2014 season included the English-language premiere of German playwright Rolf Hochhuth’s Summer 14 – A Dance Of Death, which looked at the war from a German and European perspective.
 
The following year, McPherson wrote I Wish To Die Singing, a documentary drama written in response to the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, when 1.5 million people were killed in what was then the Turkish city of Constantinople, now Istanbul.
 
The real labour of love, however, came in 2016 when McPherson premiered It Is Easy To Be Dead. The production was greeted with universal acclaim, was nominated for an Olivier Award and transferred to the West End. When the play is revived this week for its Scots dates, enabled by the show’s original producer Breon Rydell in association with Edinburgh-based spoken-word night Neu! Reekie!, it will be a homecoming of sorts for Sorley’s legacy.
 
“Sorley is really important, I think, in terms of the First World War poets,” says McPherson of the Aberdeen-born poet, who was shot by a sniper during the Battle of Loos in 1915.
 
“He was writing the same time as Rupert Brooke, who is much better known, but Sorley got the war before anyone else, and that’s probably got something to do with why his work isn’t as well-known as some of the other war poets.
 
“People in 1916 probably didn’t want to hear how war is terrible. They weren’t ready for it. Also, Sorley was something of an outsider in many ways. He was Scottish, and went through the English public school system, and he spent what we would now call his gap year in Germany, and when war broke out he nearly got arrested.”
 
McPherson is referring to the incident in Trier after Germany declared war on Russia when Sorley was detained for an afternoon before being advised to leave the country. On his return to the UK he immediately volunteered for the British Army, but his six months in Germany had left their mark. “He was able to see the war from both sides,” says McPherson, “and unlike Siegfried Sassoon and people like that, he wanted to be a social worker.
 
“As a poet, Sorley was setting things up for Sassoon and Owen, but he was also someone who was vibrantly alive. He came out of the English public school system, but wasn’t in any way old-fashioned. He went to Marlborough College, and a lot of other students there did. In this one figure of Sorley, you’re kind of seeing all of them. So Sorley is quite this modern figure. He’s just a 19-year-old kid on his gap year.”
 
McPherson’s play focuses in part on Sorley’s relationship with his parents, without whom the wider world might not know his poetry at all.
 
“They had the money to get their son’s work published,” says McPherson, “and in a way the play is as much their story as Sorley’s.”
 
It Is Easy To Be Dead is told in the main through Sorley’s letters by the show’s original cast. Re-directed for its dates in Scotland by Liz Carruthers, McPherson’s play will open in Glasgow on Remembrance Sunday. This will see the culmination of a welter of First World War-based material produced on stage over the last five years or so.
 
As well as It Is Easy To Be Dead, Sunday will mark the opening of a new production of Austrian writer Karl Kraus’s unwieldy epic, The Last Days Of Mankind, written in 1918.
 
The National Theatre of Scotland, meanwhile, will mark Remembrance Sunday with its contribution to Pages Of The Sea, a new commission from 14-18 Now, the agency set up to commission new artworks to mark the anniversary. Overseen by film and theatre director Danny Boyle, Pages Of The Sea will see portraits of fallen heroes created in sand across 32 beaches in the UK, including six in Scotland. A new poem by Carol Ann Duffy will also be read.
 
Such a level of activity demonstrates both the lingering power of the war and the level of respect it is given.
 
“There’s a sense in Britain that everything stems from the First World War,” says McPherson, “and I don’t think that’s quite the case in other countries, even though they had more casualties. I suppose there was a kind of innocence about what happened, and an innocence lost. If it hadn’t been for the First World War there wouldn’t have been a second, and without the Second World War there might not have been a Cold War.”
 
In terms of It Is Easy To Be Dead, it is also about paying homage to a neglected but crucial figure.
 
“Rupert Graves said we lost three poets of importance in the First World War. There was Isaac Rosenberg, there was Wilfred Owen, and there was Sorley. To think what he already achieved in his writing and what he could have gone on and done, you realise what a major loss that was.”
 
It Is Easy To Be Dead, The Tivoli Theatre, Aberdeen, November 6-7; Oran Mor, Glasgow, November 11-14.
 
www.thetivolitheatre.com
 
www.aberdeenperformingarts.com
 
www.oran-mor.co.uk

330 convicts, including 13 foreigners, released under amnesty

Greg Madatian
Panorama, Armenia
Nov 7 2018

A total of 330 convicts have been released from correctional facilities across Armenia under the recently adopted amnesty law as of Wednesday afternoon, the Penitentiary Service of Armenia’s Justice Ministry told Panorama.am.

Of them, 13 are foreign citizens, the service said, adding the majority of the freed inmates are from Sevan Penitentiary. 

The amnesty law signed by the Armenian president on 3 November entered into force on November 6.

The new measure marks the 100th anniversary of the First Republic of Armenia and the 2,800th anniversary of the capital, Yerevan.

1. Nubarashen Penitentiary – 16
2. Artik Penitentiary – 28
3. Vanadzor Penitentiary – 2
4. Vardashen Penitentiary – 44
5. Goris Penitentiary – 7
6. Hrazdan Penitentiary – 24
7. Abovyan Penitentiary – 20
8. Sevan Penitentiary – 99
9. Kosh Penitentiary – 43
10. Armavir Penitentiary – 34
11. Hospital for Convicts Penitentiary – 13 

166 pro-Armenian candidates win election to the US Senate and House

Jirair Kafian
Panorama, Armenia
Nov 7 2018

According to early election results, over 165 Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) endorsed candidates – roughly 92% of the 180 formally backed by the pro-Armenian advocacy organization – won election to the U.S. Senate and House Tuesday, capping off months of sustained effort – spearheaded by the ANCA Eastern and Western regions – registering voters, signing up volunteers, organizing communities, and raising funds for supportive candidates from both parties and around the country, ANCA reported.

Armenian American candidate Anthony Brindisi (D-NY), great-grandson of Armenian Genocide survivors, defeated an incumbent legislator in upstate New York. He will join Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Jackie Speier (D-CA) as the third American of Armenian heritage serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), a leading Senate champion of Armenian American priorities convincingly beat back a challenge, and will return to the Senate as the Ranking Democrat on the influential Foreign Relations Committee. Armenian American Danny Tarkanian (R) ran a spirited campaign, but fell short in his race for a U.S. House seat in Nevada.

Five Congressional Armenian Caucus leaders, including Co-Chairs Frank Pallone (D-NJ), Jackie Speier (D-CA), and David Valadao (R-CA) and Vice-Chairs Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) were re-elected. Co-Chair Dave Trott (R-MI) is retiring at the end of the term. Turkish Caucus Co-Chairman, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), a perennial obstacle to Congressional commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, was defeated.

“Today was a good day for pro-Armenian Congressional candidates,” said ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian. “The ANCA is proud to have helped empower pro-Armenian voters across America with reliable legislative information about the hundreds of Congressional candidates who sought our electoral support. Americans of Armenian heritage went to the polls in record numbers, strengthening our national standing as an engaged electoral constituency – one that expects results, demands respect, and rewards friends.”

UN expert to assess freedom of assembly in Armenia

Antonian Lara
MediaMax, Armenia
Nov 7 2018
 
 
 
UN expert to assess freedom of assembly in Armenia
 
 
 
Yerevan/Mediamax/. United Nations Special Rapporteur Clément Nyaletsossi Voule is on a visit to Armenia on November 7-16, aimed at assessing the opportunity of exercising freedom of peaceful assembly and of association in Armenia.
 
“Armenia is on the path of peaceful democratic transition with significant potential in comprehensive protection and strengthening of human rights, especially freedom of peaceful assembly and of association. The country is also favorable in terms of rule of law and the opportunity to benefit from democratic achievements and economic development,” UN expert said.
 
“This visit will allow me to observe issues regarding freedom of peaceful assembly and of association through the direct information, received from different parties,” Clément Voule added.
 
Within the frames of his 10-day visit, the UN expert will visit Gyumri, Vanadzor, Vayk and Yerevan, as well as meet with representatives of the Armenian government, the judicial and legislative systems, media sources, civil society and Armenia’s Ombudsman. He will also have meetings with representatives of diplomatic corps, UN system and international organizations.
 
Clément Nyaletsossi Voule will present a comprehensive report on his visit to Armenia in June of 2019.

CSTO member states not to agree to Armenia’s tenure in organization until 2020

Babken Chilingarian
Aysor, Armenia
Nov 7 2018

Armenia’s representative should continue tenure as CSTO secretary general until 2020, Giro Manoyan, head of the ARF Dashnaktsutiun and its Armenian Cause Office, said at a news conference today, adding that he shares this viewpoint of the acting defense minister.

“But I am not sure that other CSTO member states will agree to it, especially after the attitude displayed toward the organization even though unwillingly,” he said, adding that arresting, filing criminal case and accusing the CSTO secretary general without undertaking corresponding steps beforehand was perceived as an offense to the CSTO.

“I think the CSTO member states will not agree to preservation of the post by Armenia in this period,” Manoyan said.

As to the talks about Azerbaijan’s possible membership to the CSTO, Manoyan said it is impossible until Armenia is CSTO member.

USA to continue pressures on Armenia to bring relations with Iran to minimum: ARF-D office head

Vorskanian Yeghisabet
Aysor, Armenia
Nov 7 2018

The U.S. pressures on Armenia will continue for bringing Armenia’s relations with Iran to minimum, Giro Manoyan, head of the ARF Dashnaktsutiun and its Armenian Cause Office, said at a news conference today.

“The pressures will continue as the USA has decided that way. As to how just is the decision, it is another matter, as the EU does not share U.S. approach which means that the USA has made the decision on its own,” Manoyan said.

He said one of the key goals of the visit of U.S. President’s adviser John Bolton to the region was to warn the regional countries.

“This is rather worrying issue for us. We cannot please the USA and continue relations with Iran at the same time. The U.S. Armenian community must explain their authorities that Armenia has no other alternatives,” Manoyan stressed.

He said Armenia must continue developing economic relations with Iran and at the same time carry out explanatory works with the USA and the EU.

Armenian politician backed by Trump loses Congressional bid

Emil Lazarian
PanArmenian, Armenia
Nov 7 2018
November 7, 2018 – 12:44 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net – Armenian-American politician Danny Tarkanian who had the backing of U.S. President Donald Trump lost the race for House District 3 to Democrat Susie Lee.

Tarkanian — who had won three previous GOP primaries, but lost five general elections — lost to Rosen in 2016 by fewer than 4,000 votes in the 3rd District, which covers much of suburban Las Vegas.

As reported earlier, Democratic state Assemblyman Anthony Brindisi, an American politician with Armenian roots, declared victory over Republican incumbent Claudia Tenney on Tuesday, November 6 night in the fiercely contested race for the 22nd U.S. Congressional District seat. Democrats Anna Eshoo and Jackie Speier, both of Armenian descent, are also projected to win the polls.

Millions of voters flocked to the polls Tuesday to render their first national verdict on the Donald Trump presidency, and the results gave Democrats a House majority while Republicans retained their control of the Senate.

Kommersant: CSTO discusses appointment of representative of Belarus to the Secretary General post

Emil Lazarian
Arminfo, Armenia
Nov 5 2018
Kommersant: CSTO discusses appointment of representative of Belarus to the Secretary General post

Yerevan November 5

Marianna Mkrtchyan. The CSTO is discussing the appointment of State Secretary of the Security Council of Belarus Stanislav Zas to the post of the organization’s Secretary General, but the final decision will be made by the leaders of the alliance countries on November 8 in Astana, Kommersant writes with reference to its sources.

At the same time, the publication emphasizes that the intrigue around this appointment lies in the fact that Armenia claims the vacant post, thanks to which this issue was raised.

Diplomatic sources of Kommersant in the three countries of the organization say that the representative of Belarus will most likely become the new secretary general for the next three years.

As one of the interviewees told Kommersant, first it was suggested that Mr. Semerikov be appointed an acting officer for a year and a half – that is, for a period that Yuri Khachaturov was to work. However, according to the source, it was decided to appoint a full-fledged head of the secretariat. At the same time, he says, it was decided to be guided by the principle of rotation. According to him, after Armenia, the secretary general should be appointed by Belarus, following the alphabet.

The most likely candidate for the post of Secretary General, an informed source of ” Kommersant ” called the State Secretary of the Security Council of Belarus Stanislav Zas. Since November 4, 2015, the 54-year- old Major-General Zas has headed the Belarusian Security Council and is well acquainted with the work of the CSTO: he is a member of the Committee of Secretaries of Security Councils of the alliance.

Mr. Zas in 1985 graduated from the Baku Higher All-Arms Command School, in 1996 – the Military Academy of Belarus, and in 2005 – the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. He served in various positions in the armed forces, and in August 2008 he was appointed deputy secretary of state of the Belarusian Security Council. Calling Stanislav Zas the most likely candidate for the post of the CSTO Secretary General, the Kommersant interlocutor stressed: the leaders of the organization’s member countries will have the last word. The heads of the CSTO member countries (Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan) will gather In Astana on November 8 for a session of the Collective Security Council. It is expected that at the session the issue of the appointment of a new head of the CSTO secretariat will be finally solved. To note, both of the previous CSTO Secretary Generals before joining the organization worked as secretaries of the Security Council of their countries. Nikolai Bordyuzha (headed the CSTO secretariat from 2003 to 2017) headed the Russian Security Council in 1998-1999, and Yuri Khachaturov, who replaced him, headed the Armenian Security Council from October 2016 until his appointment as CSTO Secretary General in April last year.

It is noteworthy that Armenian Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan told reporters on November 2 that Yerevan is ready to show flexibility regarding Secretary General. Mnatsakanyan noted that if another candidate is proposed, Armenia will consider its effectiveness in this post.