For her first feature film, Nora Martirosyan, artist and filmmaker born in Armenia, posed her camera in the indefinite territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, in the Caucasus, which claims its independence since the fall of the Soviet Union. The film revolves around an empty airport, in search of travelers, which singularly recounts, in hollow and by waiting, the unceasingly disappointed hope of a whole people to “make country”.
What made you decide to make films?
I trained as a classical painter in Soviet Armenia. I then went to study in Amsterdam. I started tinkering with videos: short shapes, which I didn’t even call “short films”, and little by little, festivals and museums started showing them. I was satisfied, because what I had to express did not go beyond this format. And then I went to Nagorno-Karabakh and came across a political situation of great complexity: almost that of a fortress, as in The Desert of the Tartars [roman de Dino Buzzati, 1940]. Karabakh is not a setting: it is a fiction. And the way to access the reality of the country was to go through fiction cinema. I was not ready right away: I had to understand how to write, find the interlocutors who could help me and allow me to get to the end. What I saw there, only the cinema could help me tell.
The choice to situate the story around an airport awaiting operation powerfully synthesizes the challenges of the territory. How did you get the idea?
It was my father who knew the manager of the airport in question very well and put me in touch with him. For seven years this man kept telling me: “Next year, you will come here by plane”. Which was impossible, but he really believed in it. It was my entry into this airport. The story brings Alain, the protagonist and international listener, to this central place, both empty and swollen with hope. I have met a lot of people who work there to understand what can prevent such a place from opening. But the airport is also a way of talking about the border which, by definition, is a vague notion, always disputed, never decided.
The climate of tension that you describe in the film eventually flared up and led to clashes. What is your eye on recent events in Nagorno-Karabakh?
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