MARTIN BLANEY reports:

Filmmaker Jafir Panahi (centre) with festival director Harutyun Khachatryan (second left) and festival art director Susanna Harutyunyan (right of Panahi) with guests (Photo courtesy Golden Apricot Festival)

Armenian documentary filmmaker Vardan Hovhannisyan was the big winner at this year’s 4th Golden Apricot International Film Festival in Yerevan, picking up four of the prizes for his film A Story Of People In War And Peace at the awards ceremony preceding the closing film The Banishment by Russia’s Andrei Zviagintsev.

The film, which combined footage he had taken as a front-line journalist during the Nagorno Karabakh conflict in 1994 with interviews held ten years later with survivors in the aftermath of a devastating war, received the Golden Apricot Prize for Best Documentary, a Silver Prize from the Armenian Panorama Competition jury as well as awards from the FIPRESCI and Ecumenical Juries which were in Yerevan for the first time this year.

A Story Of People In War And Peace had previously received the Best New Documentary Filmmaker Award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival in April.

Meanwhile, the International Feature Film Competition jury of South Korea’s An Cheong-sook, Iran’s Behrooz Hashemian and Armenia’s Vladimir Msryan presented its Golden Apricot Prize for Best Feature to Ulrich Seidl’s Import/Export, the Silver Prize to Emanuele Crialese’s Nuovomondo, and a Special Diploma to Bruno Dumont’s Flanders.

Apart from honouring Hovhannisyan’s film, the Documentary jury of the Austrian Film Commission’s Martin Schweighofer, Dutch filmmaker Ineke Smits and Armenian director Arthur Bakhtamyan gave a Silver Prize to The White She-Camel by Christiaens Xavier.

UK-based Carla Garapedian’s Screamers was named Best Film in the Armenian Panorama Competition — and also received an award from the Ecumenical Jury — while a Silver Prize was presented to Karen Hovhannisyan for Time Out and jury diplomas given to Seven Indian Boys by Ashot Mkrtchyan and Graffiti by Igor Apasyan.

In addition, the Parajanov Thaler Lifetime Achievement Award went this year to the veteran directing duo Paolo and Vittorio Taviani whose latest feature The Lark Farm set against the Armenian genocide had been the festival’s opening film.

Apart from staging master classes with such visiting filmmakers as Bruno Dumont, Jafir Panahi, Leos Carax, and Andrei Zviagintsev, the festival also organised its first regional co-production forum as part of the Directors Across Borders (DAB) platform.

In addition to his four prizes at the festival, Vardan Hovhannisyan was also successful at DAB when one of his planned productions — The Last Two Tightrope Walkers in Armenia by Inna Sahakyan — was awarded a development grant worth Euros 5,000 as one of the best pitches. A second grant was given by Bianca Taal of the Hubert Bals Fund to the coming of age tale Susa by Georgian director Giorgi Chalauri which will be produced by Rusudan Pureveli and Nino Gamrekeli of Tbilisi-based Caucasian Filmodrom.

The fourth edition of the Golden Apricot festival also bore witness to the legendary hospitality of the Armenian people with the guests being offered excursions to Lake Sevan and the Echmiadzin Cathedral as well as receptions in the luxurious Latur hotel complex and the inner courtyard of the Sergey Parajanov Museum.

Martin Blaney