“I wanted to draw attention to Artsakh”: An Interview with Sareen Hairabedian

Armenian cinema, just like its history, is marked by the scars of displacement and war. The country’s most celebrated filmmaker, Sergei Parajanov, was persecuted and imprisoned by the Soviet regime. The Armenian genocide, perpetrated in the aftermath of the First World War, has been notably depicted in some of the country’s most poignant films, from Auction of Souls (also known as Ravished Armenia) made as early as 1919, to Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (2002). Sareen Hairabedian’s documentary My Sweet Land (2024) is at the forefront of another lineage of films that focus on the current tumultuous geopolitical reality in the Caucasus region – the loss of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), the ancestral land of ethnic Armenians, in the face of Azerbaijan’s violent attack.

I met Sareen at the Verzio Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Budapest earlier this year. The festival had an Armenian focus, showcasing the work of Hairabedian and another Armenian filmmaker, Shoghakat Vardanyan, whose film, 1489, also depicts the Artsakh conflict. In conversation, Sareen answers generously and patiently, giving the impression that she embraces the film’s political urgency. 

My Sweet Land follows Vrej, a 10-year-old boy from Martakert, a village in Artsakh. Hairabedian paints a compassionate portrait of a boy and of a people living on the land mired in decades of war. Young boys grow up only to go to the front – the reality of many Artsakh men. “Another war, another escape,” laments Vrej’s devastated grandmother when the family is forced to flee their village in Artsakh for Armenia. The director’s interest in Vrej’s life serves as a powerful metaphor for the nation’s recalcitrance. Slowly, the boy seems to realise that his nation’s defiance is directly proportional to his future.

Since we spoke in Budapest, My Sweet Land made headlines when Jordan withdrew the film as its submission for the Academy Awards’ Best International Film category. I caught up with Sareen over Zoom to discuss Jordan’s decision following pressure from Azerbaijan. 

– B.K.

The film opens with a mass wedding in 2008, where 700 couples got married on the same day. I believe it was an Armenian state initiative to rebuild the country after the collapse of the USSR in the 1990s. You started filming before the conflict in Artsakh escalated. How did the emergence of the conflict affect your initial vision of the film? 

I’m Armenian, but I was born and raised in Jordan in an Armenian minority. Growing up, I learnt a lot about Nagorno-Karabakh. We knew that it was one of the main conflicts that our Armenian nation was actively experiencing, but the world knew very little about the region. In 2018, I had finished another short film which was about war veterans using art and poetry as a way to process their trauma. I was living in the US at the time and I felt the urge to tell a story about a region that was very much a part of my Armenian identity, to go and document how children grow up in a place where war is inevitable and can erupt at any moment. So I went to Karabakh, and it was my first trip there. I had been to Armenia before and I speak Armenian, but I had never been to Karabakh. 

My Sweet Land

When I went there, the idea was to meet the children who were born out of that mass wedding. I wanted to meet them when they were 10 years old, and to document their lives in Artsakh through their eyes. We didn’t know what would happen two years later. When I got there, I met 30 families in different villages, and Vrej’s family struck me the most. There were actually two other families that I followed, but in the end, I felt that to do a really in-depth story about this region, I needed to focus on one family and tell the story of one child. In the beginning it was very much a portrait of a place, that was the idea. When the conflict happened, things took a different turn. 

How would you have ended the story had the conflict not happened?

It’s interesting you ask about this, because when we were pitching the film, a big question was, where is this film going? People would say, “You’re showing us a portrait of a child in a war zone, but then what? You know, there’s no active conflict.” But for me, there was, I wanted to draw attention to this region, and I wanted to show that even if there was no active war, there was the cloud of war. So what does that do to people? And how does it change the way societies raise their kids? So that was the direction that I wanted to take. Intergenerational trauma exists in every family from Artsakh, from grandparents to children, and that’s what I wanted to process with the family. But at the same time, I was very open to surprises.

I never felt like I knew I had an ending. I don’t remember at any point looking at the footage and saying, I need to find my ending. I just didn’t have any answers, but I simply believed in the boy. I think it’s also connected to my commitment to the story. There were so many open-ended questions: What is going to happen to the country? What is going to happen to Vrej? What is going to happen to the whole region? 

I was in Armenia this summer at the Golden Apricot Film Festival in Yerevan. There were a number of films that highlighted the conflict, including Emily Mkrtichian’s There Was, There Was Not, Shoghakat Vardanyan’s 1489 and Yervand Vardanyan’s Orbita. There seems to be a certain wave of Artsakh films because the conflict happened so recently. Is this the first kind of reflection of the trauma and the conflict in film in the Armenian context? How do you feel about your film being part of this wave alongside other stories? 

Of this particular conflict? I think it is, on this scale. I remember when I went to film in Artsakh in 2018, the villagers did not understand why I wanted to tell their story because they felt that the world had forgotten them. I think there is a wave and I think it is because of the urgency and a dearth of answers we were left with as Armenians who were literally ethnically cleansed from a region of our ancestral lands. The news talked about it for a week or two and then it was gone. So I think there is a movement and it just so happens that it is led by female filmmakers, which tells me something about Armenian women who are the people who keep the stories and pass them on. Did you see Emily’s film, There Was, There Was Not? 

I saw 1489. It is such a powerful story.

I just spoke to Shoghakat. Her documentary is a personal look at the human cost of war as she and her family come to terms with her brother’s disappearance during the war. There is a need to tell these stories because all of a sudden we saw ourselves as witnesses to history. My footage exists in the past now. I feel so proud that there are so many stories coming out from the region, and I wish there were still more because different stories offer different perspectives. Emily Mkrtichian’s film is about the resilience of the women in Artsakh. Mine is a coming-of-age story of a boy growing up there. French filmmaker Alexis Pazoumian made a documentary called The Black Garden about three generations of Armenian men living through the conflict. We all took different perspectives without speaking to each other. I think this is a beautiful thing. 

My Sweet Land

There does not seem to be much intervention on your part, which makes sense dramatically. However, in the final act of the film, two years after the conflict, Vrej, now 13, confronts you directly, wanting to know how you will end the film: with the hero’s (his) death, or his survival against all odds. How did you navigate this occurrence? 

As much as it’s his story, it’s connected to my story as an Armenian. We had a lot of conversations on and off camera. When he asked that question, I felt like he was asking the question of the whole generation… but also, a question on behalf of all Armenians, “What’s going to happen to us?”

Can you talk about working with him?

I would come to Artsakh every year in August on his birthday to see how he had changed or to see what was happening around him. Our relationship developed very organically. In the beginning I said to him I wanted to learn about his life. I also wanted to see Artsakh through his eyes. As we progressed, there were times when he asked me to turn the camera off. We became friends and he became very comfortable with the camera. In the beginning he was so excited to show me everything – the birds, the chicken, the village. I felt so free with him and that was, I think, what gravitated me towards him. There was a kind of similarity between us, a sense of curiosity and being open to everything. Throughout the filming I was trying to understand him and I was also trying to understand my relationship with him and what I wanted for him. It was a constant search.

What was it like filming in the middle of the conflict?

For the longest time I was on my own. Twice my producer, Azza Hourani, was able to join me to do the sound, but every time I wanted to go in, I had to do all this special paperwork. It was risky because you didn’t know what was going to happen. Two months after the last scene I shot, there was a blockade. Azerbaijan blocked the only road that connects Artsakh to Armenia and the rest of the world, for a full nine months. If I had stayed there, I wouldn’t have been able to leave. You know, growing up in Jordan, we were surrounded by war zones all around us. War was part of our daily conversations, part of our identity, from Lebanon to Syria, from Iraq to Palestine… In a way, I felt fine operating in those places where there was always the risk of war at any moment. That strength was inside me and it did not stop me from pursuing Vrej’s story.

My Sweet Land

One of the most important sequences in the film is when Vrej goes to the military summer camp after his family returns to Martakert, Vrej’s birthplace. The children were being kept there in army-like conditions – sleeping in barracks, learning how to hold a gun, aiming and shooting. At the same time, they were playing and having fun. Can you talk about filming there?

I was in Armenia and I called his mum to say I could come and film Vrej, and she said Vrej was in a summer camp in Armenia. His mother was not sure what it was, so I asked her to give me the address. After a long, bureaucratic process, I got the permission to film there. I was shocked to see how small Vrej felt there, as if he was out of place. It was really absurd for me to see him holding a gun and I could see that he wasn’t feeling comfortable with it.

For people unfamiliar with growing up in a post-Soviet context, the scenes of children holding guns might seem shocking. I come from Kazakhstan and we also have these military training lessons, as part of our school curriculum in high school. I remember learning how to take an AK-47 apart and put it back together. It is such a remnant of the post-Soviet period. 

It’s exactly like that. When I say I was shocked, I was shocked by the image, by the look of it. Because I remember walking in and there were little children on the floor, on their tummies, aiming. As much as I think it’s absurd for some societies, it’s also very normal and expected for some. I mean, there’s something that’s extremely disturbing when you really think about it. But from a societal perspective, what else can we do? These people are so isolated and traumatised. They don’t want to do this. Nobody wants to teach their kids how to operate a gun, or how to resist or defend themselves. But they found themselves in those situations. There was so much I could say just by filming that. That said, it was very important for me not to romanticise it. There’s no picture of Vrej with a gun as the publicity material for the film. That could easily be a sellable image, a story about the militarisation of children. But that’s not the story, it’s much bigger and more nuanced than that. 

Speaking of returning, did the villagers perceive you as an outsider? Has your own relationship with Armenia changed?

I think I never felt like an outsider, even though I grew up in a diaspora. Our history is connected to theirs. We were a generation of the Armenian genocide survivors, and we never went back. Half of my family is Palestinian, and they never returned back. So this fractured history of losing a homeland, building a new one, assimilating but longing, is part of my family’s cycle that makes me who I am today. So when I went to Artsakh, I went there with that lens. I naturally became very vulnerable with them. I was as open with them about my life as they were about theirs. There was constant open communication about what it means to lose a home. Vrej’s father, who was barely in the film, was always exploring these issues with me. He didn’t want to be filmed, but after the cameras were off and we were having dinner, we would talk about why they kept coming back.

The children also wondered why they were going back? The grandmother and the mother talked about it explicitly in the film.

The children did not wonder, they knew nothing else. They knew they belonged there. It’s their home. After the war, a lot of land was taken away. Now there’s no Karabakh in the sense of Armenians living there. But if you ask Vrej if he would like to go back one day, he still believes that he will go back home one day. He lives in Yerevan now.

Did he come to the premiere in Yerevan? 

The whole village was there! There were 400 people. It was the first time since the events that all the villagers came together. So everybody was connected. It was a very emotional and powerful way to bring this whole story to a close.

Jordan’s decision to withdraw the film from its submission for the Academy Awards’ Best International Film category came as a complete surprise. What do you make of this situation?

When we heard that the film was Jordan’s official submission, we were so proud as a team that we were able to bring so much attention to the story of Artsakh. It was important to me that Jordan recognised the film, because there’s a minority of Armenians living there. But then, after the withdrawal, we were obviously disappointed. And we searched for answers.

We didn’t get many answers, except that the Azerbaijani embassy had filed complaints that the film was a threat to the diplomatic relations between the two countries. So Jordan had to withdraw it. For us, it was proof that My Sweet Land is a very important story. It is also absurd that the story of a child growing up on his land could be a threat between two countries. That’s why we had an even stronger urge to push the story further and we managed to qualify it for the documentary category, even though it didn’t get shortlisted. For us, it was important that the story continues to be pushed on this global platform, and that it continues to focus on the human stories of the conflict, rather than the political interventions that try to silence them.

The film is banned in Jordan, is that right?

Yes. Because of that complaint, there is a ban on it. So it cannot be shown publicly in Jordan, even though it was supported by Jordan. It actually received development funding from the Royal Film Commission, where we pitched and won three awards at the Amman International Film Festival. I hope that one day they will lift the ban and re-embrace this film.

Do you plan to continue to focus on Armenian stories? 

I think that My Sweet Land took a lot out of me, emotionally, physically, mentally, and it still does. I think I would like to go back and do something more connected to my family history, something that I have been slowly building over the years. But for now, I want to change things a bit and tell a story that is not directly connected to me, just to step away and rebuild my perspective. There are multiple projects going on and I am taking it one step at a time.