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     Ewan Waddell’s documentary The Longer You Bleed not only captures the physical destruction of war; it also explores another, less visible front—the battlefield of the mind. The film illustrates how individuals cope with the psychological strain of conflict, where simply maintaining daily life and refusing to give in becomes a form of resistance. Instead of portraying civilians...

At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking (2024) directed by Maja Novaković, follows the isolated life of an elderly man in the cutting landscape of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Each movement, set against the boundless line of the snowy horizon, is transformed into a series of dreamlike symbols. Feelings of loneliness and seclusion somehow sit alongside intimacy and peaceful imagination,...

High heels on snow. Across a white horizon, a frail figure, all corset and ruff, moves forward. The ice crunches beneath her feet. In a single shot, Agniia Galdanova captures the heart of her film: Jenna Marvin's poetry of contrasts and the Russian queer artist’s struggle to live in a hostile environment.

What happens to a people’s spirit when they are displaced and uprooted from their land over and over again? Their children grow up to become activists. This is the premise of No Other Land, a documentary about the resistance and resilience of the inhabitants of Masafer Yatta, a group of Palestinian hamlets in the occupied West Bank. The official reason for demolishing the region was to make...

The 2024 Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival showcased three debut films by young Armenian filmmakers, each offering a poignant exploration of the human toll of the violence, ethnic cleansing, and mass displacement caused by the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. Set against the backdrop of the 2020 Second Karabakh War and the brutal 2023 attacks by Azerbaijan, these films...

Land for as far as the eyes can see. From the window of the car carrying Vrej and his family, it’s hard to identify borders. And yet, for the breakaway republic of Artsakh, repeatedly under attack from Azerbaijan, it’s what matters most. With My Sweet Land, Sareen Hairabedian documents war and exile through the keen eyes of a child.

There are many adjectives that often accompany the word "land": fertile, mountainous, green, insular. Many adjectives that can describe its form and uniqueness. However, when the land itself is our home, and that home is threatened, those adjectives suddenly feel insufficient. Then, we need to call upon words that  express our emotions and declare the importance of this place for our...

What happens to the psyche of an 11-year-old boy when war is no longer a child's game but an everyday reality? This is a salient question that comes to the fore when looking at graphic images of children in the heat of war and genocide. Documentarian Sareen Hairabedian takes a different approach. Instead of violent evidence of lost innocence, in her debut feature-length documentary, My Sweet Land...

In 2019, Taika Waititi gave us Jojo Rabbit, a bittersweet portrayal of what it’s like to grow up during times of war. Even though the premise of Waititi’s movie is grim and bleak, the execution is surprisingly colorful, the conclusion is optimistic, good defeats evil, liberty arrives, the children are freed from war and propaganda. Sareen Hairabedian’s 2024 documentary titled My Sweet Land might...