Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh and Russia’s Ukraine invasion have come to Armenia, where the future is uncertain.

In September, Azerbaijan launched a military offensive in the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region in the South Caucuses at the heart of a decades-long conflict between the two countries. Azerbaijan seized control of the territory in less than 48 hours, forcing hundreds of thousands of ethnic Karabakh Armenians to flee across the border. And they’re not the only ones. Since Russia launches its invasion of Ukraine, around a hundred thousand Russians have also fled into Armenia to escape conscription and sanctions.

But this massive influx has driven up prices and led to job scarcity in the capital, Yerevan, which makes life really difficult for the thousands of people looking to hoping to rebuild their lives there. GZERO World correspondent Fin DePencier tells the story of two people who fled to Armenia to escape war—one from Nagorno-Karabakh, the other from Moscow—to see how conflicts playing out thousands of miles away have a huge impact on the thousands of war refugees looking for a place to call home.

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)

Since Azerbaijani forces invaded the Republic of Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, on September 19, forcing more than 100,000 Armenians from their ancestral homelands in an act that has been described as “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide,” at least three Armenian cemeteries and one 19th-century church in the region have been damaged by new and expanding construction work. In addition, numerous other churches, cemeteries, and other historic structures are increasingly being threatened with damage and destruction by encroaching Azeri activities.

The recent violations add to a slew of attacks on Armenian religious and cultural heritage sites in the region in the wake of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, marking a renewed effort by the Azerbaijani government to erase the existence of Indigenous Armenians from the landscape.

Satellite monitoring by the Cornell University-based research program Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) detected that between October 5 and November 3, bulldozers paved a road through the Yerevan Gates Cemetery in Shushi, also known as Shusha in Azerbaijani, according to the group’s December report. Home to 78 tombstones with Armenian inscriptions dating from 1802 to 1913, the burial ground is obscured by thick forest, making it unclear for researchers to identify which tombstones were damaged. 

Armenian inscriptions in religious sites have frequently been targeted by the forces of the Azerbaijani dictatorship, which is seeking to erase these markers of Armenian history. Back in 2019, Simon Maghakyan and Sarah Pickman reported on these pages about the eradication of thousands of monuments of Armenian heritage across the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan, a report later verified by Caucasus Heritage Watch. Using a pseudo-scientific theory that these traces of Armenian existence are fictitious, the Azerbaijani government has supported the desecration and cultural reappropriation of churches and tombstones under the guise of so-called restoration.

CHW researchers also reported damage to another historic site in Shushi during October, the Ghazanchets’ots Cemetery. The gravesite, which already has deteriorating tombstones, was recently targeted by construction vehicles and used as a dumping ground for debris. In addition, researchers noted that satellite photos taken on November 3 showed demolition debris recently dispensed onto the original base of the Meghretsots St. Astvatsatsin Church, a Shushi religious site that was initially founded in 1838. After sustaining immense damage under Soviet rule so that only the tabernacle and altar spaced remained, the site was converted into a movie theater in the 1960s until the Artsakh Republic’s Service for the Protection of Historical Environment excavated the church’s foundation in 2017.

On top of these cases of new damage, an ongoing construction project northeast of a cemetery near Vazgenashen/Hajisamly has resulted in significant wreckage to the area. Home to carved cross stoneheads known as khachkars, the historic burial site was initially threatened by encroaching construction activities in June before sustaining additional damage from construction activities this fall.

“The strategies of desecration and erasure are very specific and very targeted,” Christina Maranci, Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University, told Hyperallergic recently in an interview, describing the destruction as a means to “essentially obliterate Armenian existence from everyone’s memory.” 

“Now, there’s even more at stake,” Maranci explained, pointing to the “countless monuments, churches, cemeteries that serve as markers of Armenian existence for multiple millennia” that have now recently come under Azerbaijan control since the mass Armenian exodus from Artsakh in September. Notably, CHW researchers described in their December report how the Azeri military offensive has “dramatically” increased the scope of their satellite monitoring.

Maranci added that although social media can be a tool for accountability, these platforms have also transformed Azeri attacks on Armenian cultural and religious heritage into “optical forms of terrorism and violence.”

“We’re all waiting for Azeris to post something,” Maranci said. 

“It is extremely painful for Armenians and Armenian-adjacent communities. We need more people to pay attention and the world to pay attention.”

https://hyperallergic.com/830115/azerbaijan-escalates-attacks-on-armenian-heritage-sites/