Scottish premiere; Film of the year for Sight & Sound, 2007; Golden Apricot International Film Festival, best debut; Grand-Prix winner at Split International Film Festival and First Prize at Moscow Human Rights Festival; International Film Festival Rotterdam 2019
Wheelchair accessible, English subtitles, Pay-what-you-can tickets (£0-£8)
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72 years after the 1934 release of Nutsa Gogoberidze’s Uzhmuri, the first Caucasus feature directed by a woman, the late Maria Saakyan’s The Lighthouse (Mayak) became the first film shot in Armenia to be directed by an Armenian woman. Set in a picturesque village in the Caucasus mountains, Mayak is Saakyan’s quiet and melancholy reflection on community, memory and loss during war. The protagonist Lena travels from Moscow to her childhood village in order to persuade her grandparents to flee. Escape proves elusive.
Mayak’s slow ruminating narrative foregrounds the sense of our connections to our roots – ‘of a world that remains in the imagination no matter how often one leaves or attempts to leave’, as BFI’s Peter Hames put it. Saakyan is Armenian, and the screenwriter Givi Shavgulidze is a Georgian born in Abhkazia, hinting at the conflicts that inspired the film. Yet, Mayak deliberatly omits specifying the village and the war that threatens it. It is a tender requiem of love for the multicultural Caucasus region, plunged into a seemingly unending cycle of violence by imperial interests.
Cinematically, this film is committed to the great multicultural legacy of Caucasus filmmaking, casting the Georgian actress Sofiko Chiaureli, Sergei Parajanov’s muse who starred in The Colour of Pomegranates, and the Armenian Sos Sargsyan, who was in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, in their final screen roles. Restored by the Hamo Bek-Nazarov Project, Mayak’s tender, human politics remain more relevant than ever today. Almost exactly one year since Azerbaijan’s months-long blockade and subsequent ethnic cleansing of the Armenian majority in the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, Saakyan’s quietly mesmerising reflection on belonging has not lost its power.
Content notes: themes of war and violence
Access notes: loud noises
Curated by misha irekleh
Trailer
