Géographies

The young Lebanese filmmaker and video artist Chaghig Arzoumanian lives and works in Lebanon and France. Her grandparents fled as children from their home village Burunkisla during the Armenian genocide of 1915. On the eve of the 100th anniversary of these violent events, Arzoumanian travels in the footsteps of her grandparents to the country where they never grew up, looking for the landscapes and the history of a displaced people.

In Géographies she tells the story this exile with its accumulation of first names, stories, journeys and photographs handed down to her in snippets, through hearsay and anecdotes. Her Armenian heritage takes on mythical proportions and becomes re-inscribed in the imposing contemporary landscapes. “The ruins became one with the land,” referring to the Anatolian plains. From Turkey, the exile wends its way to Beirut. Family members remain in Cairo, journey on to Damascus, Jaffa… The map of this exile turns into a colored tapestry of many hues and patterns – an epic woven together out of individual experiences.

In Armenian, with English subtitles