Born in 1961 in Moldavia, of a Jewish mother and Armenian father, Artur Aristakisjan gets emotional when he talks about his childhood : ?When you?re brought up in a loving environment, you want this love to last once you?ve become an adult, but you soon realise that it can?t.? Never very interested in school, he preferred to spend his time listening to old people telling stories about the past. From the age of thirteen, on his travels within the confines of the Soviet empire, he discovered that love is not the most shared thing in this world we live in. The trauma of this realization has never left him, and has even become the founding principle of his work. He has lived alongside dissidents, hippies and avant-garde artists in the Ukraine, Russia, and Central Asia.
Passionately interested in the cinema, it took him eight years to be accepted by the prestigious Moscow film school, the VGIK, which he finally got into at the age of twenty-eight. There he met the great documentary filmmaker, Alexander Kotchekov, who had the vision to support him in the making of his graduate diploma film, Palms. For four years Artur Aristakisjan lived with the beggar community in his hometown, shooting his film single-handed. Although he had to sell his personal possessions to finance the film, the homeless helped him out with money. At the Nika ceremony in Russia, (the Russian equivalent of the Oscars), he won the prize for best documentary. In spite of the horrors it relates, the film is very moving and spiritually enriching. It?s a cry of desperation. Afterwards, the director went to live on the streets of Moscow, having no fixed home. For Aristakisjan, there?s no happy medium : the choice is between intellectual fascism that you have to avoid at all costs, or life as an outlaw, living as an outcast.
Coming to the notice of Iouri Norchtein, the great cartoon filmmaker, Palms was launched on an international career and did the rounds of the festivals, creating a stir in Berlin in 1994. On the strength of this success, in 1995 Artur Aristakisjan submitted several projects to the Goskino (former State Film Committee), one of which was retained. With financial backing from a private Russian producer, he went to live in a squat and began to make A Place on Earth. Funds began to run out when the Russian producer lost faith in the project and pulled out. Artur Aristakisjan didn?t give up, but sold all his family possessions and used up the money he?d made on his first film. The English composer, Robert Wyatt, a fervent admirer of his first documentary, donated the musical rights for free. Six years later, the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival during the Directors' Fortnight..
?A Place on Earth" is carried by the encounter between the raw rigor of its realism, the resolve to approach the subject head on, the extreme violence of real events, and the determination to find in this sojourn in the hell that is the lives of the world?s outcasts, the equivalent of the great themes of religious paintings [?] Full of mysticism, Artur Aristakisjan?s film is consumed by a powerful affirmation of the metaphysical value of suffering, but it?s also wonderfully concrete, bringing to life before our eyes some of L?on Bloy?s best writing as well as the work of the great Russian authors.?
(Jean-Fran?ois Rauger ? Le Monde) |
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