HY RU EN
Asset 3

Loading

End of content No more pages to load

Your search did not match any articles

Nigol Bezjian’s Ceaseless Search for Truth and Discovery — An Interview

By Christian Garbis

Filmmaker Nigol Bezjian is a master storyteller who conveys pathos and lust for life, introspection and emotional extremes of joy and sorrow in one sweep.

Born in Aleppo, Syria in 1955, Bezjian immigrated with his family to Boston in 1974. He earned a BFA in Cinema Studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and then further pursued his passion for filmmaking at the UCLA School of Film, Theatre and Television where he graduated with a MFA in Film Producing, Writing and Directing. 

For much of the last three decades, having worked part of that time for Future TV in Lebanon, Bezjian has been involved in producing celebrated broadcast television programs throughout the Middle East. His first full-length feature film Chickpeas released in 1992 earned wide acclaim that continues to this day. His filmography includes A Rock, a Rope and a Tree (1980), Cycle Carmen (1981), The Hour of the Gray Horse (1984), Billy’s Night (1986), Roads Full of Apricots (2001), Muron (2002), Verve (2003), Home/Land (2008), Milk, Carnation and a Godly Song (2013), I Left My Shoes in Istanbul (2013), Rumi: The Same Gate (2014) and most recently, Thank You Ladies and Gentlemen (2014). He is the co-founder of the production company Think+ which provides services to television and media production companies in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Russia.

Regrettably, I have not been able to see many of his films since they have limited screenings, and I never seem to be in the same place where they’re shown. But appreciators of the documentary are fortunate enough to view two of his films online.

Verve extraordinarily captures the elegance of dancer Shakeh Avanessian in slow or stop-motion images, some resembling swirling rings of fire and zoom shots of flame-like ascending graceful fingers. It is an exemplary gem of the cinematic poetry Nigol Bezjian so eloquently conveys.

Home/Land,made in 2008 for the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, begins with terrifying images of ideological battles and the consequential endured pain of the conflict in Lebanon that left him stranded and obliged to direct from a distance. That introduction then segues into the main subject matter of the film, capturing the intimate thoughts of global literary voices assembled in Paros who themselves have struggled with themes of identity and strife in relation to the significance of home either though personal experience or the piercing power of narrative.

I had the privilege to speak with Bezjian, who is based in Beirut, during his recent visit to Yerevan in early November about his current research for a new film and also his tour de force - a documentary about the legendary Armenian poet Daniel Varoujan.

Can you tell us about your recent projects?

Well, I recently finished a documentary film called Thank You Ladies and Gentlemen.It’s more of an observational documentary about the daily life of Syrian refugees who are camped in Lebanon. I spent a lot of time with them before I filmed until they became comfortable with me, and I filmed them for six days. Two weeks ago the first premiere screening took place in Antalya, Turkey at the Golden Orange Film Festival. It will have a second screening in Toronto, and plans are underway to broadcast it via satellite and local television.

I also just did an art installation titled Çanakayna in Çanakkale about the Armenians who served in the Ottoman army. I was asked why I included a picture of Sevag Şahin Balıkçı who was killed while serving in the Turkish army a few years ago. My answer was that in Turkey, whenever you’re celebrating any institution’s history it’s always 82 years old, but when it comes to the army they say it’s a 600 year-old institution. So is it an Ottoman army or a Turkish army? It’s a continuation. And Sevag was killed while he was dressed in that uniform, while he was on duty as a citizen of Turkey.

And now you’re working on a new documentary about Armenian orphans from the period of the Armenian Genocide?

Yes, the documentary is called After This Day. I’ve been doing research about this one particular school in Antoura, Lebanon that was converted into an orphanage by the direct orders of Jamal Pasha, where they had gathered 1,200 of the most intelligent orphans they could find. Nearly 200 of these children were Kurds, and this school was very particular because most of the orphanages were operated by Christians— mostly Scandinavians, Americans and some British. But this one was Turkish, and the idea was to Turkify the orphans so theywould be part of Turkish society, not to Islamize them—the Kurdish were already Muslim. These children endured incredible hardship; they were hungry and punished very badly. Anyone who spoke an Armenian word was punished. They had to learn the Koran.

There’s a lot of information available, but much is lacking. For instance, we don’t know the names of all the staff. We know some of them because there are two or three memoirs written by people who were orphaned there. This was a time when last names were not that common yet. And of course people who were running this school starting with Jamal Pasha, who was a military man,were disciplinarians teaching them military exercises. There were guards from the Turkish gendarmerieand there was a man in charge of hygiene and health who was also a military man. So we think that there must have been lots of documents going back and forth since it was run under Jamal Pasha, and historians believe they may be in the military archives, which are closed and inaccessible. Some documents were found by chance showing direct orders for a lot of money to be sent to this school, and this was during the dire last days of the Ottoman Empire when it was collapsing, financially bankrupt, there was famine and poverty and so forth. The orphanage was chaotic, so the kids would escape and thieve in the vineyards and houses nearby. This lifestyle was forcing these kids to become thieves.

What happened to the orphanage and the students?

At the end of World War I in 1918, the Turkish staff left. One day the kids woke up and there were no teachers, there was no discipline, nothing. Except for one man named Reza Bey who gathered the kids in the dining hall, and he told them that he was left behind on orders to poison the kids, but he couldn’t. In the process of Turkification the kids were given Turkish names—Talaat, Jamal, Ahmed and so forth. This man called them one by one and asked, “What is your name?” One boy answered “Shukri.” “What is your Armenian name?” In this case it was Haroutiun Boyajian, whose daughter I interviewed today. And then he said, “From this day forward your name is Haroutiun, once again.” And all these kids went through this process. During this chaos the kids were having fun, no one was telling them what to do, how to talk. The American missionaries came and brought some Armenian teachers to “re-Armenianize” the students. Even during the harshest days of their lives the kids secretly prayed in Armenian—a few had the Bible hidden under their beds. Only one or two kids were converted to Islam and circumcised.

For me it was interesting that this was considered an act of genocide in the conventions that define what genocide is—forcibly converting people of one ethnicity and religion to another. We haven’t looked into this, and we have plenty of orphans who told their stories. The Armenian nation basically survived through widows and orphans.

We found some documents in Antoura. Some of them were in the archives of the American University of Beirut (AUB) because the Americans had saved them. Reza Bey was arrested a few days after the American and British missionaries came. He was grabbed by his arms and they [the kids-CG] stood by the windows watching him being taken away. Reza Bey’s identity exists because he was mentioned in the memoirs of Manvel Bedrossian, one of the children who eventually moved to France.

Bedrossian was adopted by a Mrs. Miller who came and took 11 orphans, one being a Kurd, to Anatolian College in Marzvan. Three of them went to Thessaloniki and studied agriculture. One of them, Karnig Panian, whose memoir Housher Mangutyan yev Vorputyan (Recollections of Childhood and Orphanhood) has just been translated into English and will be published by Stanford University Press as Goodbye, Antoura, also talked about these issues. He became an educator in Beirut and has a daughter,Houry Boyamian, living in Boston who is the principal of St. Stephen’s Armenian Elementary School. So there are good examples of what the kids became - very successful, learned men.

Haroutiun Boyajian knew English very well and relocated to Armenia. He was asked to be a translator for the KGB but refused, and as a result he was sent to Siberia. Five years later he returned. Then he went to fight in World War II and became a prisoner of war. Eventually he returned to Yerevan.

And the more you look into this whole story,the more you’re amazed. So you see, the issue of the orphans and orphanages is a very big part of our recent history that we haven’t looked into enough.

However, this didn’t only happen in 1915, it also occurred in 1909 during the Adana massacres. Orphanages were run at that time by Jamal Pasha, who was a young manthen. He told his colleagues to go to Adana and take care of the orphanages.

Haroutiun Boyajian remembers Jamal Pasha—who was also known as Jamal the Butcher by some—in a good way. In fact, this man was a very clever boy and used to make leather belts with pockets in them for money. And when Jamal went to the orphanage to visit the children Haroutiun, thinking he would get better treatment, offered Jamal the belt, but he didn’t take it. Nonetheless, he told his colleagues that he was very smart and special attention should be paid to him. And Haroutiun somehow managed to keep this belt and take it to Yerevan, and now it’s on display in the Armenian Genocide Museum in Yerevan. Of course this is all research material and I don’t know how much of it will actually be in the film.

But I’m not concentrating so much on the specific story of Antoura. I’m looking at the larger picture of orphans and Antoura is a strong example that I am using. There were hundreds of orphanages and there are maps of cities showing where they were located at the time, such as in Iraq and Jerusalem.

You had mentioned an orphanage in Gyumri where children displaced during the Genocide had ended up.

Yes, it had 30,000 orphans at one point, which is a huge number. Not all of them had that many.

And it became problematic because the children would grow, and they had no place to go. There were no established families to adopt them. So different solutions were found, one being that all the troublemakers were left on the street to fend for themselves. Some of them became thieves and committed petty crimes. There were some suicides. The good ones were sent to AUB to become servants of professors who at the same time received an education. The other ones were taken to Marseilles and Grenoble, France to work in the factories. That was there destiny.

And you hear these stories… on the way here in the Beirut airport there were two women. One of them was in a wheelchair, from Aleppo moving to Yerevan via Beirut. She was telling the other that her mother was an orphan. Orphanhood is so much part of our history and we hardly pay attention to it; scholarly, creatively or politically.

What is the reason for that?

I think we are the kind of culture that doesn’t heed our recent history. We don’t separate things from our normal, daily routine life. Life goes on. We talk about genocide with political demands, slogans and so forth, but there’s a lack of Armenian Genocide specialists. Genocide Studies is new to Armenians and there aren’t many scholars, so that’s another reason. For a nation that makes genocide central to everything in their lives there’s a lack of Genocide Studies. There are lots of historians everywhere talking about genocide, not just the Armenian Genocide, and young people from various countries are getting involved. It’s picking up momentum, but the number of Armenians is few.

Being an international filmmaker, can you comment on the state of the film industry in Armenia today?

Although I’m not qualified to talk about Armenian cinema, I know that many of the early filmmakers were basically Russian Armenians who came from Moscow to start Armenian cinema here. And I know it was not easy for them to make films during the Soviet times because everything had to be approved by Moscow. There were lots of ideological considerations to address, so it wasn’t purely free cinema. Technically some of them were accomplished, and the films they made weren’t any less than what was produced in other Soviet republics.  

It’s very interesting that in the early era of cinema you’d see lots of Armenians involved all over the world. The script for Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin was written by Nina Agadzhanova [born Nune Ferdinandovna Aghajanian]. The first person to open a cinema in Aleppo, Syria was Armenian. Armenians had always been involved in cinema.

If you look at any Armenian organization in the Diaspora or ministries in Armenia, I don’t believe there is any cultural policy to make things happen with cinema. Filmmakers have to find their own way.

I don’t really know what’s happening now, but I see light, superficial, fast and cheap comedies being made in Armenia. This is also happening in Egypt and some other countries. Perhaps it’s occurring in other former Soviet republics because their cultural and historical backgrounds are very similar.

Now there is a new generation that is trying to make very creative, personal films. Of course that has to do a lot with the availability of equipment, which is a lot less costly today than it used to be. But technology doesn’t make the films; it’s the creative mind that makes them.

You recently made a revealing film about Daniel Varoujan - Milk, Carnation and a Godly Song.

Yes, I made Milk, Carnation and a Godly Song about two and a half years ago, and it’s three hours long. I had been thinking about this film for a long time and I didn't know how or when to do it.

But when this new Turkish-Armenian dialog started back in 2010 I saw something coming. There was talk in Turkish newspapers about the Genocide, intellectuals were arrested and so forth. And I asked myself whether they knew the value of people like Daniel Varoujan, what their worth was? It’s easy to say that Daniel Varoujan was a great poet who was killed, but can you really identify what he wrote? So this is how it started.

I wanted to meet the philosopher and literary critic Marc Nichanian for an interview, and when I reached him he told me he was in Istanbul teaching Armenian literature. I was in New York at the time.  He said he was going to be there for two more weeks so I told him I was coming. Without any preparation, a budget, research and a picture in my mind I packed, took my camera and went to Istanbul for the first time.

Long story short I had a Turkish assistant, an old Turkish classmate from UCLA who helped me and I talked to Marc. And I continued making the film as I was doing my research. I read every single book that was written about Varoujan analyzing his poetry, discussing his life and so forth. I researched the history of Istanbul Armenians, then I started finding people who could speak about Varoujan to obtain different perspectives about him as a thinker and as a poet,and I had to travel to see them, wherever they lived. I filmed in Aleppo before the war, Beirut, Istanbul, Paris, Padua, Venice, New York and Boston.

Varoujan was one of the great Armenian poets who covered all of Armenian history from pagan times up to when he was killed. He wrote four books as a poet and produced only during 11 or 12 years of his life. He was 31 when he died and was a very learned, well-read young man.

Marc Nichanian talks about him as the poet, as the mourner. When the ability to mourn your death is taken away from you, you’re finished. As long as you have the ability for someone to visit your grave, you can rise up again. And of course this is understandable from the poems Varoujan wrote.

Seta Dadoyan talked about Daniel Varoujan the philosopher who was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche and others. Archpriest Boghos Levon Zekiyan spoke about the spiritual aspect of Daniel Varoujan, the 1,000-year gap between him and Grigor Naregatsi and how spiritually they are connected to one another despite the gap. We spoke to Antonia Arslan, the author of Skylark Farm, who translated his Song of Bread into Italian, which is in its sixth publication now. She discussed Varoujan as the romantic and human. But I did not permit anyone interviewed to discuss or quote from Song of Bread because I wanted to address that on another level. Excerpts from Song of Bread were read in French, Italian, Arabic and English. So as we talk about Varoujan in different places, we also hear his poem recited in different languages, most recently translated into English by Tatul Sonentz, which will be published soon. The idea is that although Varoujan was killed, his poems are told all over the world. He’s not dead in a way.

I used water as a motif to tie all this together, moving along from one place to another in the film. You know there is one thing that’s very interesting. Daniel Varoujan was born on the edge of the Halys River, in Sebastia [now Sivas], a water city, then he goes to Istanbul which is another water city, then to Venice and Ghent, Belgium, which are also water cities.

I finished the film around the time when the first commemoration of the Armenian Genocide was held in Turkey, in Taksim Square, where there were probably around 200 people gathered. It was the first time in history where Turks openly commemorated April 24. A friend of mine was there and I wanted his insight because from Taksim Square they marched to Haydarpaşa train station.You see, all the intellectuals arrested during the week of April 24, 1915 were gathered and put on a boat on the European side and taken to the Asian side to the Haydarpaşa train station. Then they were sent on their exile. I wanted him to tell us about his knowledge of Haydarpaşa, and it was the first time we heard about how Daniel Varoujan was killed along with four others, three of who were intellectuals and one was a baker. There was a witness to the killing and we have that report.

So what happens essentially is that after watching this film about this man’s cultural and artistic value, we also witness the cultural evolution of the Armenians from pagan times up to 2010.Then we find out how this man was killed. That’s the impact, it’s very powerful. And the person who murdered him didn’t know who he was killing.

The film opens and closes with the Antastan, which is also the title of a poem by Varoujan. Antastan is an old pagan ritual that was carried into Christianity, called the Antastan service. In church when the do the Antastan they turn east, west, north and south. That used to happen outside of the church walls and in pagan times they did the same in the agricultural fields. Anyway, because Varoujan grew up as a Mekhitarist he was well aware of all these things. He took this Christian ritual and converted it into his own prayer. So, in his own Antastan, he wishes goodness to the four corners of the world. The poem incidentally was supposed to appear in the beginning of Song of Bread.

The music throughout the film is improvised and inspired by the music of Gomidas. Gomidas and Varoujan were very close friends.

At the end of the film a statement reads that Daniel Varoujan’s remains have yet to be found. It’s a provocative thought, actually. Why haven’t we searched for it?

In my research I found so much supplementary material from the writings of seven of his colleagues who managed to stay alive somehow. Varoujan was killed in August—the same day he was killed his wife was in labor with their third child. They said that Varoujan was the only one amongst them who never participated in any discussions.He was always alone, writing. He always wanted notebooks and pencils to write. They said that during that time he filled at least six notebooks. We don’t know what happened to these notebooks, but according to one story, before he was sent on his death journey, the gendarmes came and confiscated everything that he and Roupen Sevag had. [Sevag was another western Armenian writer killed in 1915-CG]. So knowing the Ottoman and Turkish obsession with collecting documents and evidence,I’m sure there must be something somewhere.

There’s now talk about showing Milk, Carnation and a Godly Song in Istanbul. I want to make the point that this man left Istanbul alive. Bring him back!

 

(Christian Garbis is a writer and experimental filmmaker, born and raised near Boston, Massachusetts. He received his BA in English and Certificate in Film Studies from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.His first novel, titled "A World Without Wings," is complete and awaits representation. His short story "A Disintegrating Mind," which was adapted from the novel, made the Top 25 list in Glimmer Train’s December 2012 Fiction Open. He lives in Yerevan, Armenia, and maintains two blogs about his experiences there: Notes From Hairenik and Footprints Armenia.)

Comments (1)

Yeprem
A very interesting and exhaustive interview regarding Bezjian and his various projects. I thank Christian Garbis for it and would hope that Hetq starts to publish more such quality writing. I can't wait to see the Varoujan film.

Write a comment

If you found a typo you can notify us by selecting the text area and pressing CTRL+Enter