Sweet Confusion

MAY 17 SCREENING PROGRAM

14.00
Erankyuni [Triangle]
Henrik Malyan
1967, 84’ (Armenian with Turkish subtitles)

16.00
Hayrik [Daddy]
Henrik Malyan
1972, 76’ (Armenian with Turkish subtitles)

18.00
Menq enq, mer sarery [We and our mountains]
Henrik Malyan
1969, 94’ (Armenian with Turkish subtitles)

MAY 18 SCREENING PROGRAM

14.00
Barev, es em [Hello, it’s me!]
Frunze Dovlatyan
1965, 137’ (Armenian with Turkish subtitles)

16.20
Vesikalı Yarim [My Prostitute Love]
Lütfi Ö. Akad
1968, 90’ (Turkish with Armenian subtitles)

18.00
Bir Gecelik Gelin [One Night Bride]
Atıf Yılmaz
1962, 77’ (Turkish with Armenian subtitles)

FILM SUMMARIES

Erankyuni [Triangle]
Henrik Malyan
1967, 84’ (Armenian with Turkish subtitles)

Five blacksmiths and a teenage united by traumatic displacement, grief for the past, difficulty in adapting to new social conditions, and the gentrifying habitat experience elusive moments of brotherhood and solidarity in a tiny triangle-shape smithy. While the adults set a choir of melancholic folk tunes waived by singing and the strikes of hammers, Hovik the teenage dreams of Hollywood, Mary Pickford, Wild West, casinos and cinema. A short-lived limbo between nostalgia for lost homeland, a frightful optimism about the uncertainty of future, and an undisguised admiration for Silent Era Cinema, the film is a canto of a sweet and sorrowful journey to oblivion that can never be fully attained.

Hayrik [Daddy]
Henrik Malyan
1972, 76’ (Armenian with Turkish subtitles)

Hayrik [Daddy] marks the end of the Thaw epoch as well as the shift in the socio-political paradigm in Soviet Armenia; the transition from the modern to the post-modern condition. Generational conflict is relayed through the life of a big family living in the center of the early 70s’ Yerevan, that is perplexed with the arrival of a countryside resident patriarch, the grandfather. A 1915 survivor strives to regain his national identity and sense of homeland through the restoration of conservative values that seem to have disappeared in his family’s lifestyle: notions of family as an autonomic microcosm, shelter of the nation as well as the ultimate accumulation of vigor and morality.

Menq enq, mer sarery [We and our mountains]
Henrik Malyan
1969, 94’ (Armenian with Turkish subtitles)

Working in the mountains, the mowers and shepherds of Antaramej village find lost sheep. They decide to butcher and roast them for a barbeque. During the feast, they find out that the sheep belong to their fellow villager Revaz. The ‘criminals’ pay the herder in order to settle the incident, but somehow, the state finds out about this incident. The village and its ‘idyllic’ life are thus interrupted by the arrival of a militia lieutenant from Yerevan whose mission is to investigate the case. In the end, the notions of justice, order imposed by state authority, the police officer and the villagers bilaterally rethink the role of the state and the social structure in the peasant community.

Barev, es em [Hello, it’s me!]
Frunze Dovlatyan
1965, 137’ (Armenian with Turkish subtitles)

The young physicist Artyom Manvelyan constantly thinks about his best friend Oleg and the beloved Lyusya, and the happy times he had with them in the Moscow of 1940s, while he strives for the development of cosmic physics in a research laboratory on Aragats peak, in Armenia.
Endlessly strolling in and around past and present, the wartime Moscow, the heights of an eternal winter in Armenian highlands, Yerevan, the 60’s Moscow and his own memory space, the protagonist is in constant a dialogue with his alter ego.

Vesikalı Yarim [My Prostitute Love]
Lütfi Ö. Akad
1968, 90’ (Turkish with Armenian subtitles)

The greatest love story in Turkish cinema, Vesikalı Yarim [My Prostitute Love] is a ‘realist melodrama’ that represents the sentiment of 60s’ İstanbul in an authentic way. Poetically written and carefully crafted in cinematography, Vesikalı Yarim juxtaposes the realist imagery of the diverse interiors and landscape of the 60s’ with mystical moments of love between a salesman and an escort. Halil and Sabiha come to life with impressive performances of Türkan Şoray and İzzet Günay. Still remembered with its dialogues and its insightful use of music, Vesikalı Yarim presents an oscillation between desire and withdrawal, and a long lasting doubt that pervades the story throughout. Vesikalı Yarim succeeds in creating a rupture in the traditional moralist approach.

Bir Gecelik Gelin [One Night Bride]
Atıf Yılmaz
1962, 77’ (Turkish with Armenian subtitles)

Not long after his divorce from his 11th wife, Burhan, the Casanova, meets a young woman, Oya, and marries her. On their first night, he starts to realize that Oya is very different from his earlier wives. The tricks of Oya that begin on the night of the wedding continue with the fantastical events she devises for Burhan, including abduction by an Arab prince and a fight with a Gypsy gang. As Oya disguises herself in different characters, Burhan falls more and more in love with her, finally giving in. Having tamed Burhan, Oya remarries him as her real self. One of the most refreshing yet somewhat unknown comedies of the 60s, Bir Gecelik Gelin [One Night Bride] is a film that reflects different cultural influences on the lifestyles of the 60s.