The Black Garden
Alexis Pazoumian / France & Belgium / 2024 / World Premiere / 80 min
With cinematic brushstrokes and few words, a bleak story is told of three generations living in the shadow of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. A brilliantly orchestrated study in how conflicts recreate themselves.
Even a dialect or a map in a classroom is not neutral when conflicts simmer along a national border in the former Soviet Union. The past is reproducing itself, and in ‘The Black Garden’ we get a sense of how. We are in Nagorno-Kharabakh, where a long-standing and overlooked tension between neighbouring Armenia and Azerbaijan erupted into war last year. Two young boys wait impatiently to defend the country they know. One too young to be in the military, the other just old enough. French-Armenian photographer and visual artist (and now filmmaker) Alexis Pazoumian uses the cinema screen as a canvas, where every dark and atmospheric image – and every cut in between – adds a line to a story of heroism, the bitter legacy of the past and the myths that hold it all together. But wars are never glorious to anyone but those who start them from a safe distance. A cruel logic that dawns on you with a hellish clarity in a film by a director with a brilliant sense of light and shadow – and of how phantom pains are passed down through generations.