The Winning Generation

Armenian Lullaby is based on the verse of my great-great-grandfather, Rafael Patkanian (1830-1892) about a mother who is singing a lullaby to her child, calling on different birds who are associated with various professions. The baby falls asleep only to the song of Falcon, who is singing battle songs, in other words, chooses the profession of a soldier. Traditionally it's considered a patriotic song: in the country that survived genocide, Soviet regime and recent war with Azerbaijan, sons' primary vocation is to become soldiers. This interpretation is dedicated to Mothers of all soldiers.

INTENT TO DESTROY embeds with a historic feature production as a springboard to explore the violent history of the Armenian Genocide and legacy of Turkish suppression and denial over the past century.

On Easter 2018, a man put on a backpack and began to walk across Armenia. His mission: to inspire a velvet revolution and topple the corrupt regime that enjoys absolute power in his former Soviet nation. With total access to all key players, this documentary tells the story of what happened in the next 40 days.

Casimê Celîl was born into a Yezidi Kurdish family in 1908, in a village called Kızılkule, located in Digor, Kars. The village and family life, which he longed to remember throughout his life, ends with the massacre they endured in 1918. During his long road to Erivan, Armenia, he lost all his family members. Left all alone, Casim was placed into an orphanage and was forced to change his name. To remember who he was and where he came from, every morning he repeated the mantra “Navê min Casim e, Ez kurê Celîlim, Ez ji gundê Qizilquleyê Dîgorê me, Ez Kurdim, Kurdê Êzîdî me”, which translates to: “My name is Casim, I am the son of Celîl, I come from the village of Kızılkule in Digor, I am a Kurd, and I am Yezidi”. He clings to every piece of his culture he can find, reads, and saves whatever Kurdish literature or art he comes across. As the year’s pass, Casim finds himself with an impressive collection of Kurdish culture and history.

Only women, children and old people live in this Armenian village, while the men work in Russia. A life with a rhythm of its own, an independent daily life marked nonetheless by exile.

Turkey's history has been shaped by two major political figures: Mustafa Kemal (1881-1934), known as Atatürk, the Father of the Turks, founder of the modern state, and the current president Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan, who apparently wants Turkey to regain the political and military pre-eminence it had as an empire under the Ottoman dynasty.

Ever since the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, the still disputed territory is contaminated by landmines. This documentary follows five female de-miners on their risky job.

More than one million Armenians perished between 1915 and 1916 in massacres or brutal deportation programs. Turkey still denies it ever happened. Laurence Jourdan examines massacres of Armenians in the decades leading up to the mass murder, and the geopolitical situation both before and after the genocide. Contemporaneous reports and documents written by Western diplomats stationed in the Ottoman Empire describe the methods used and the deportation routes. These accounts are mixed with personal stories from the living survivors and archive footage from Ottoman authorities.

The last collaboration of Artavazd Peleshian and cinematographer Mikhail Vartanov is a film-essay about Armenia's shepherds, about the contradiction and the harmony between man and nature, scored to Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

Raphael, Yervant Gianikian's father, survived the Armenian genocide in 1915 in Eastern Turkey. In April 1988, while living in Venice, he sat for his son's camera and read an excerpt from his memoirs, translated from Armenian into Italian.

Stone, Time, Touch is a documentary made by Gariné Torossian about the relationship of three Armenian women from the diaspora with the land of Armenia. The young woman (played by Kamee Abrahamian) is visiting Armenia for the first time. The older woman, Arsinée Khanjian has a more conflicted and analytical perspective of her identity and her relationship with the fledgling democracy, one of the former Soviet Union republics. She has been to landlocked Armenia many times and comments on photos taken by French photographer Marc Baguelin. The third trajectory is more subtle and is represented by Gariné Torossian herself whose face is super imposed from time to time in this stylistically-layered documentary.

In a decaying Soviet-era retirement home, a vibrant group of elders cling to life by staging Shakespeare. Yet loneliness lingers beyond the theater’s doors, until drama begins to blur with reality.

A feature documentary presented and directed by former Royal Marines Commando Emile Ghessen. The documentary tells the story of the 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno Karabakh. In the fall of 2020, Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a brutal bloody war. Azerbaijan won, decisively. The feature documentary 45 Days: The Fight for a Nation tells the story of this conflict, from the Armenian perspective, focusing on the human cost of war and its impact on the large Armenian diaspora.

The Grammy-winning lead singer of System of a Down, Serj Tankian helps to awaken a political revolution on the other side of the world, inspiring Armenia's struggle for democracy through his music and message.

Humans transform the world. In a stone mine, huge majestic rocks are blasted into pieces and after passing through the stone processing line, they gradually transform into pebbles.

The Falcons is an intimate, observational documentary that delves into the world of the Tshakhruk Ethnoband, a remarkable musical ensemble in the Armenian highlands. Comprised of special-needs children that reside at the state orphanage, these young musicians find solace, strength, and self-expression through the transformative power of music.