“Recently, my young son came up to me. He had seen my old uniform hanging in the closet. He asked me, ‘Daddy, are you a warrior?’ and I didn’t know how to respond to him.” It was this moment that Vardan Hovhannisyan describes as the turning point when he knew he needed to return to the archive footage he shot during the Karabagh war. “The film combines strong and unique archival war footage from the trenches of a 20 metre battlefield with the human and touching stories of the survivors who are now living on in peace time. Twelve years later I had the opportunity to follow them over a year-long shooting period and was able to create a very close and intimate portrait of their lives and their universal stories.”
The Asia Pacific Screen Academy expresses its respect for and acknowledgement of the South East Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. We pay our respects to the Traditional Owners of country, including the custodial communities on whose land works are created and celebrated by the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. We acknowledge the continuing connection to land, waters and communities. We also pay our respects to Elders, past and emerging. We recognise the integral role Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and First Nations peoples continue to play in storytelling and celebration spaces.
