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Editor's Pick – Short Docus of 2022
Home video archives from the 1990s have become a source of inspiration and analysis to rethink our recent past. It seems that the creative use of VHS archives in an essay documentary style has become a trend in the South Caucasus, too - a form Chai Khana filmmakers are keen to explore and experiment with.
The new generation of filmmakers have access to a very rich visual archive of their everyday lives - a kind of ‘domestic ethnography’ that provides insight into a turbulent period in the South Caucasus through personal, familial or communal perspectives. A quote from Chris Marker can easily be the motto of this year’s selection: “These images are not the substitute for my memory, they are my memory.”
"Glasses crack, tablecloths splinter" directed by Anna R. Japaridze, represents a conscious effort to revisit the memories of Georgians. Inspired by her family's personal footage, the filmmaker uses homemade videos to observe the values, joys, and concerns of people through different media formats. By salvaging Georgia's undigitized home video cassettes, Anna is preserving memories and artifacts from life in post-Soviet Georgia.
Note
Since "Glasses Crack, Tablecloths Splinter" is competing at international film festivals, it is not available online. Chai Khana intends to re-release the film in 2023.
Disillusioned with her present in post-war Armenia, young Armenian filmmaker Greta Harutyunyan picks up a camera to explore her options for the future. But, in order to comprehend the future, she goes back in time, revisiting it through a home video archive created by her aunt. Through this ‘time travel’ we can discover Armenia reflected in its recent past, different generations, and their conflicting visions for a better future.
Note
Chai Khana commissioned and produced “Instruction for the Future” in 2022. Chai Khana intends to re-release the film in 2023.
Building 12/35 resembles other apartment blocks in Sumgait, Azerbaijan. However, many of its residents share a uniquely tragic fate: most of the men born in the building in the 1960s and 1970s died early, many from drug and alcohol abuse. The film by Matlab Mukhtarov explores the lives of those men and the memories of those left behind: the childhoods they shared and the choices they made. These men, now in their 60s, reflect on what has happened to their generation, why most of their friends and relatives died so young, and how this particular apartment block captures the story of a whole generation.
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