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“If No One Documents It, It Basically Doesn’t Exist”: Emily Mkrtichian on Her DOC NYC-Screening Feature Debut There Was, There Was Not
There Was, There Was Not When she first started filming in the Republic of Artsakh—a small “breakaway” state where most residents were ethnically Armenian, but lived under the control of Azerbaijan—Emily Mkrtichian was planning to portray the pivotal roles local women play 30 years after experiencing a violent war. But her project was thrust in a completely different direction when the small sovereign state became besieged by sudden conflict once again.
Taking its title from the opening line of most Armenian fairy tales, Mkrtichian’s feature debut is fascinated with the preservation of a place that no longer exists. For the first half of the film, we simply follow the daily pursuits, musings and aspirations of four Artsakh women. There’s Sosé, a martial artist who is determined to win Olympic gold one day; Siranush, who runs for political office despite dismissively misogynistic attitudes; Sveta, leader of the first all-women troupe of de-miners, who carefully remove landmines left over from the last war; and Gayane, founder of the nation’s only Women’s Center. When Azerbaijan begins its campaign of ethnic cleansing, their lives are permanently altered; what never wavers, however, is each woman’s commitment to what is most important in their personal lives and communities. Some join the front lines of battle, others are displaced with their families, few hunker down and refuse to abandon their homes.
“I want to give people a way to understand this place that we no longer have access to,” Mkrtichian told me when I asked about specific audience takeaways she hopes for. “Something that is happening to many places in the world right now. And I want art to be a beacon of hope for us in these experiences, and I want women’s experiences not to be lost to the historical record.”
Mkrtichian and I spoke a few days before the screening of There Was, There Was Not at DOC NYC. The following conversation covers why she didn’t opt for a “traditional” verite approach, the challenges of the edit and the fairy tales that the filmmaker is currently sharing with her child.
Filmmaker: One of the film’s central parallels involves the liminal framing of Armenian fairy tales. Can you elaborate on what makes these folktales unique within this region? Do you have any particular favorites from your childhood?
Mkrtichian: I think Armenian folktales are not necessarily different from a lot of older cultures’ fairy tales, in that they’re meant to teach you something. In Armenian culture, some of the information that we find most important to pass on [is how to] survive in the world. So, a lot of our fairy tales are actually pretty dark, which a lot of other cultures’ are, too. In the film, I use this book of fairy tales by this famous writer, [Hovhannes] Toumanian. One of my very favorite little tales in it, which I’m reading to my son right now, is about this sheep mom and her daughter. The mom goes out every day to get milked in the fields and then comes back. It’s basically about this wolf coming and knocking on the door and pretending to be the mom and the little kid almost letting them in. That’s a thing that happens in Armenian fairy tales: you have to be very clever. I was pregnant while we were editing the film, and I was thinking about the fact that I was making a film that would be really scary for a young kid. I think about when I can share my work with my child, which made it felt important for me to pass on this tale to the next generation. There’s some information there that will help you survive, if that makes sense.
Filmmaker: Yeah, I know you recently had a child, and I wonder how that experience has impacted your relationship to this film and your cultural heritage?
Mkrtichian: My great grandparents were displaced during the genocide, then my grandparents were displaced. My parents moved to the U.S., so there’s this [family] history of moving through lands, which I always knew about growing up. But the central trauma of the genocide for my great grandparents felt like something that was really far away from me as a kid, and even as an adult when I went to Armenia. When the war started, I can specifically remember the feeling of something being ignited in my DNA. I really think that helped me survive the situations that I was in. Because I got pregnant when I was making this film, I was thinking a lot about what it means to pass on a story and the importance of culture, language and why we tell the stories that we do. I think this happens in a lot of cultures that experience some sort of central trauma: you want to make sure that culture and language survive into the future. It became really important for me to speak Armenian with my kid and have them experience this place, because I don’t know how long it’s going to be around or how long we’re going to have access to it.
Filmmaker: An endearing element of the film is your subjects’ constant awareness of the camera, specifically your presence behind it. Did you ever try to encourage them to ignore their being filmed, or was that never a concern of yours?
Mkrtichian: When I first started making the film, I really envisioned it as an observational, traditional verite documentary. The one exception to that being Sosé, because Sosé doesn’t follow any rules [laughs]. She is a celebrity in her own right in her own life, so she likes interacting with the camera. But the idea of myself being a very specific, embodied person behind the camera became a very important idea during the edit. We worked really hard to develop it throughout the film in organic ways. It was when the war broke out that this idea of a filmmaker who is distanced from their subject or “a fly on the wall” became almost unethical to me, completely impossible. It felt very important to acknowledge that there was someone behind the camera who cared very deeply for the people on screen.
Filmmaker: Were there any other potential subjects that you wished to follow, but it just didn’t work out?
Mkrtichian: You know, there weren’t. By the time I hit four people, I was like, “Okay, I need to stop.” Choosing who would be in the film was this really organic process of spending a lot of time in this place, meeting people, talking to them and being inspired or drawn to different women for various reasons. Two of the women in the film were friends of friends. Sosé I met through a group of kids that I was teaching a film workshop to. They were obsessed with Sosé, and of course I became obsessed with Sosé. I met Sveta because I made a short film about the first group of women who went out to be deminers in Artsakh in 2015. Each of these four women seemed to embody this different but very important thing about this place, some idea of strength and community.
Filmmaker: To that point, the presence of men is incredibly muted whenever possible. They appear during dinnertime, on FaceTime calls or in the audience at sports matches, but are never really platformed. How did you navigate this?
Mkrtichian: We’ve talked about how the camera is this proxy for myself, and what I was interested in was these four women. What you see in the film is more a result of what I thought was the most interesting part of the story. The intentional part would be that I was really feeling two things. One, they live in a society that already gives so much attention to men, so I was envisioning them watching the film later and really seeing themselves as the protagonist. The other part, especially once the war hit, was that every story in the media was focused on the men who were fighting and [portrayed] the women and children as fleeing victims. The women that I was seeing were not victims in that sense. They were active, working and doing just as much fighting as any of the men were on the front line. They easily held their own story without needing to reference the men around them.
Filmmaker: You were shooting for at least a year before Azerbaijan began its campaign of ethnic cleansing in the region. Your original intention for the film was to explore the role of women in this society after the war, but what conversations did you have with your subjects and collaborators as conflict became inevitable?
Mkrtichian: I was actually shooting for three years before the war started. When war started, I was actually in Artsakh filming what I thought were the last scenes that I needed to go back and edit a film. So, that was obviously very unexpected. I think it also presented a very tricky part of the edit, because I was focused on the legacy of conflict in those first three years of filming, but in no way on the idea that it could happen again. I didn’t believe that it was going to happen, and neither did they. I think when you live in a place like that, you have to believe that it’s not gonna happen again. There’s kind of a double-consciousness that exists around getting down to the business of your everyday life and working towards a positive goal. Especially in the wake of the conflict, I realized how invisible these women felt. There was no record of their work. No one else was documenting what they were doing. All of the ways they risked their lives and worked during the conflict were just erased. If no one documents it, it basically doesn’t exist in history. We talked a lot about how the war had been covered internationally—what stories were deemed “worthy” of the news—and how the film could do it differently.
Filmmaker: How did you sift through that initial three years of footage and decide what to highlight before the conflict?
Mkrtichian: One of the major artistic decisions of the film is to give ample time and space to the Artsakh that existed not only in reference to war. There’s 40 minutes of the film where you get to really live a life in that place, experience it with the women and understand their hopes and dreams during that time. The editing process was a challenge because a lot of people assumed that the beginning would just be a condensed prelude to the “real” story, which is the war. It took me a long time working in collaboration with different people to concretely understand what I wanted to say about these women and their stories, to really insist on a beginning that wasn’t just foreshadowing a later conflict. When we were cutting scenes from that first three years of material, I prioritized what they really cared about, lit them up and showed the beauty, the complicated life that could be lived in a place whose existence was precarious.
Filmmaker: It’s great that the first half of the film focuses on their lives, because it makes it that much more devastating to understand the ramifications of the initial war and its reemergence.
Mkrtichian: It’s a payoff that you have to be patient for. I think the classic way to have started this film would be with bombs, a wink of, “Don’t worry, we’ll get to the action.” But it’s important to be patient with these women and their lives in the first half so that the second half is more meaningful.
Filmmaker: Was it hard to decide when to stop shooting?
Mkrtichian: I mean, for years I was holding onto that camera as a way to hold out hope. I was just walking around with a camera, waiting for something to happen. I had this feeling of a deep responsibility to explain this to the world, to the women, to my kid. Unfortunately, the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh happened when we were editing the film. I was three months pregnant. I think that was the moment where I realized we were at the end of the process. That was also the moment where I turned to this idea of storytelling as a light in one’s community when times are the darkest.
Filmmaker: Have you seen any of these women since completing the film? Will they have the opportunity to see it?
Mkrtichian: We have the Golden Apricot Film Festival, which is the biggest festival in the region. It was screening in the regional competition, and we made all tickets free to anyone who had been displaced from Artsakh, because most people from Artsakh had come to Armenia at that point. The halls were just filled with people from Artsakh. You walked out of those screenings and there was not a dry eye. I was there with my two-month-old baby for three hours after every screening, just talking with people. All four women were there as well, and they got to be in community and have discussions with people about this place. So many people came up to me and said, “This is something that I’ve been trying not to think about, and coming here gave me a way to actually remember this place in community with all of these people.” That was so cathartic for me. Those screenings made everything worthwhile. It was the ideal of what could have happened for the film. The film ended up winning the Fipresci Prize there. It felt like not just a recognition of me, but a recognition of them in this place. It was a bittersweet celebration, obviously, but something that we all appreciated being able to do together.
