Maria Saakyan talks about her first fearure, The Lighthouse.
The Lighthouse has a very interesting mixture of fiction with real events footage. The opening and closing scenes in particular, where did you find them?
The final footage is a real documentary, which I found in the archive. It portrays pieces from different wars, Chechnya, Abhasia, Armenia and they all look so similar, which is why we wanted to make the film about general Caucasus.
Yes, you do not seem to refer to any war in particular…
That’s right. Around 1992 and 1993 we had the same situation in each of these countries. In the beginning of the film the shot is real and I filmed it in Sohumi, a city which is now almost dead, after the war with Abhasia and Georgia. We suddenly saw this dancing couple and since I had my little camera on me, I just filmed them.
This scene is amazing. I watched it three times last night. There is something very captivating about it. This couple is dancing to the sound of shooting, which was obviously added in post-production. Then there is this footage of birds flying…
This was a present from Artavazd Peleshian. This fragment appears in one of his films, which he made out of found footage. And then he gave it to me.
This is your debut feature and you made a short film before, Farewell. How did you come to make films?
You know about my short film, that’s great! I finished VGIK [Russian Film Institute in Moscow] and graduated in 2003 with that film. Then I decided to make a feature but I actually prefer Farewell to The Lighthouse…
Where could we see your short film?
Rotterdam’s Mediatheque has it!
The Lighthouse touches on the issue of the personalization of history and suggests that perhaps official history does not capture everybody’s personal experiences of the war.
Yeah, that is true and in fact Armenians don’t like this film that much, because for them it is too personal and not enough about Armenia. They wanted it to be exclusively about the Armenian conflict but I wanted to show a part of a war. To me war is something general. It is a loss of your origins if your country suddenly disappears and this feels the same for everybody.
Your film contains everything that could be associated with Russian cinema: poetry, music, landscape. Where would you situate yourself within the Russian cinematic tradition? I can certainly see your debt to Tarkovsky, but are there any other filmmakers that influenced you?
Tarkovsky, of course! I was brought up on his films. When I was young, my mother often took me to the cinema to see Tarkovsky’s films, because he was very famous at that time. I read his books and I like his understanding of cinema a lot. From him grew my fascination with Bresson. I like Aleksei German a lot. He is very interesting and his work broadened a lot of horizons to me, but it would probably be difficult to understand here as he works with language quite a lot and those nuances will probably be lost in translation. From contemporary Russian cinema Ilya Khrjanovsky is also very interesting.
Your film deals with memory and loss and at times it reminded me of my experience of reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (aka Remembrance of Things Past). To what extent was The Lighthouse your subjective vision?
The most important thing in cinema, for me, is honesty. And we are not talking about entertainment cinema here. For me this is the only thing that it is worth giving to others. If you are lying on screen, I as a spectator do not want to deal with this. Cinema is like this unique connection, it is like speaking…I don’t want you to lie to me and I would not lie to you.
The film has beautiful music and the most amazing opening credits…
The music score was composed by a Finnish musician [Kimmo Pohjonen]. And on this film I had an international crew, the art director was Serbian for example. As for the opening credits, I just imagined them to be like this, because the film is like a letter and the writing of the credits reflects this.
There is a scene in the film, where the inhabitants of the village watch a TV that stands on a table outside. It is a very absurd and surreal scene…
You mentioned everything that is important in the film, you know! That’s amazing! The most interesting thing was, that during shooting we had this TV, which was on all the time and this footage was a chronicle about genocide. It is by chance that it was showing just there when we were filming. It was an amazing coincidence! And it fitted into the film so well…
Was this Anna Kapaleva’s [Lena] first role?
Yes, it was. She is a theatre actress and I wanted her to try to act in film. I think my approach on The Lighthouse wasn’t right as I did not give my actors enough time to rehearse. They were given the script before but we had no time to practise, so went straight into shooting.
The film is quite short, 78 minutes…
I cut a lot of scenes out as they just didn’t work and I had much more material than that but somehow it was too much of it.
This is your first feature film, what for you is the importance of public film festivals, such as LFF?
They are of great value and importance because how else could I show The Lighthouse to non-Russian audiences? How else could I find the audience that I got here last night for example? People had things to ask me during the question and answer session, which is amazing for me!
Kamila Kuc
BFI LFF Web Editor
PhD Candidate, Birkbeck College