Arus Hakobyan
25-year-old Arus Hakobyan is a journalist from Armenia. She has graduated from Yerevan State University, the faculty of Journalism. Arus earned her first Master degree in Diaspora studies. She has been working as a journalist at TERT.am Armenian news web portal for three years. Now she is a MA student of GIPA.
Author's stories
"When I was four years old, everything changed in my life. Then it changed again and again." This story is about two women who were born in different centuries but have similar destinies. 95-year-old Azniv and her 5 year old great granddaughter Arta witnessed migrations when they were four. The map of their journey spans from Turkey to Syria, then from Syria to Armenia. Now they live in the Catholic Parish of Armenia, where 80-85 Syrian Armenians have found their homes.
When I was Four
Vardges Gaspari is not the activist you'd expect. To start with, he does not stand up, he prefers to peacefully lie down on the pavement, or on the court floor, and be dragged away by the police rather than walk with them. Born and raised in Teheran, the 59-year-old electric-ware importer moved to Yerevan in 1986 and soon got involved in the movement for Nagorno Karabakh's independence. Since 2005 he's been been a regular in Armenia's civil rights movement and demonstrations, even as a sole protester.
Gaspari
104-year-old Satenik wants to give life to her old house, which has been uninhabited for 20 years. She is the only one taking care of this big, abandoned house. It's a place, where she has lived for approximately 80 years of her long life. All her memories are related to this place. She knows the story of every single object, and every stone in this house. But now everything is dying for her in the space dear to her, and she wishes to die here. The film shows how an old woman feels after she had to move from her native village, native house. Moreover it shows how much all these things and places, dear to her, mean. Satenik has 7 sons. Even though she realizes that none of her sons, grandchildren and great grandchildren need this house in the small, disappearing village, deep in her heart, she still hopes that one of them will come to live here and take care of everything. She herself came to leave...
I came to leave
For Aksana Gigolyan, choosing where to study is an identity dilemma. The 18-year-old ethnic Armenian lives in the village of Khulgumo, in Georgia’s Samtskhe-Javakheti region, and would like to follow in the footsteps of her older sister, Seda, and enroll in university in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Like many of their peers, the two young women want to integrate into Georgian society, but their parents and others of that generation fear that, once in Tbilisi, about a three-and-a-half-hour drive away, their children will gradually distance themselves from their Armenian roots.
The Sisters from Akhalkalaki
Bishop Bagrat Galstanyan looks radiant as he shows the Japanese ambassador to Armenia, Jun Yamada, the new school being built in a village in his parish of Tavush, a northwestern Armenian region which borders Azerbaijan. Optimism is a scarce commodity here. Gunfire is the norm.