The Synopsis

Nazareth was twelve years old, Lousaper still a newborn when the Armenian genocide was perpetrated in 1915. The film traces the paths of their solitary peregrination throughout exile;

from their village of Burunkişla to Beirut, as they passed by Karantina’s camp, Cairo, Saida's orphanage and Jbeil, before meeting again, years later, around a lunch table where they fell in love and decided to found a family.

His eyes are those of my father, which are today mine.

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« This story was told me over the years by the old people of my family. They remember Anatolia the great center plateau of Turkey and Asia (…) Anatolia was the ancient home of Greek and Armenian people. For five hundred hard years ago the land was overrun by the Turk. And from that day the Greeks and the Armenians lived here as minorities. The Greek subject people. The Armenian subject people. They wore the same clothes as the Turks (…) ate the same food, suffered the heat together,

Used the donkey for burdens and they looked up at the same mountain.

But with different feelings for in fact they were conqueror and conquered. » (…)

{Elia Kazan, America, America}

The Project

This journey through my family’s past started innocently four years ago, when I was watching Elia Kazan’s America, America, in La Piazza Maggiore de Bologna.

Hearing its preluding words made me remember confusedly bits of stories my aunt Zarminé had once told me about my two Armenian grandparents Lousaper and Nazareth.

Shortly after, I travelled back to Beirut and went to see her.

As she spoke out, my grand-mother’s soul rejuvenated and expended away from her old quadrangular apartment and reached out seas, roads, orphanages, streets and soils; while my grandfather stepped out from his black and white frame and murmured me stories of joy, sadness and struggle.

Nazareth shut his eyes at the age of fifty-seven carrying away with him the last visions of the « old country ».

His eyes are those of my father, which are today mine.

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It is extremely significant to me that the realization of the film occurs on centenary of the Armenian Genocide. I feel an urge and a challenge towards my grand parents, the Armenian community and History to represent through this documentary, the life of these anonymous individuals who shaped the landscapes of unrecorded history and who were finally the ones transmitting to us - the next generations - their strength and fears, habits and stories.

In this film I seek to hear and exhume, through the intimacy of my family’s path the mechanism of man in his struggles, failures and hopes throughout life.

For the past two years I have been gathering their stories and roaming around the places they lived in. And I realized that I was exploring an unknown past together with a new facet of the present time. Beirut, the city where I grew up and the different regions of Lebanon, Cairo and Turkey, hid under their common appearance a multitude of historical layers. By superposing these two times: the mythical time of narration to the contemporary landscapes, I aim to enlighten silent legacies and hidden layers of the socio-political present and to reach, through the intimate voice of the particular, the epic of human experience.

Turkey - the village of Burunkisla

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Lebanon

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Egypt - Cairo

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Friends on set

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GEOGRAPHIES