Around the village, all is calm. The vibrant Vrej, eleven years old, goes for a walk through the paths and houses. Here, he sees his grandmother making bread ; there, a neighbor and his semi-domestic pigeon, which is older than him, Vrej is told. It is a small world — a mere one hundred and fifty people and twice as many cows, sheep and geese. Viewed through the boy’s eyes, the definition of paradise. There lies the talent of the Jordanian-Armenian director : to make us forget, even for a minute, the sufferings of this land. She addresses them right from the start of her documentary, through archival footage and voice-over testimonies that recount the story of a population forced to fight and to flee while also providing essential geopolitical data. Since the fall of the USSR, no one living in the Nagorno-Karabakh mountains has been spared by war. The republic of Artsakh and its population — predominantly of Armenian origin — has been under constant threat from Azerbaijan, which claims the territory. And yet, as we stroll around with Vrej, we seem to forget all of it, immersed in his simple love for his land. But a child’s love is not enough to stop the world’s pace, and war returns. On September 2020, Azeris launch an attack. There are no more walks, no more neighbors : the animal noises, interrupted by bombs and sirens, are then replaced by the constant traffic of Yerevan, where Vrej’s family has found refuge. From this point on, the camera stays almost exclusively indoors, filming the kitchen, the living room, a pottery workshop. Even the brief moments outside are enclosed, whether by the courtyard’s walls or a car’s frame. In these times of longing, the horizon shrinks.
Home front
Sareen Hairabedian's documentary is staged very soberly, the cinematography keeping a low profile in front of words and situations. That naturalistic style, embodied by an ever-moving camera, puts no distance between us and what is being filmed, and proposes itself as a witness to the struggle that has been ignored by the rest of the world. Gradually, the director becomes Vrej's confidante, who shares his ambitions, desires and fears directly with her. But alongside these moving and sometimes impish addresses to the camera, the film also speaks through its silences. The great absentee: war. Although it’s everywhere, it’s nowhere to be seen directly. Hairabedian doesn’t film the conflict or the trenches, but focuses on the living, on those who, without seeing it anywhere but on TV, are still experiencing it in their flesh. All we see of war is what’s left in its wake: displaced families, destroyed walls, soldiers who are not the same when they return to their home village. Constant uncertainty. Doubts. What will the future be like? Should we return to this land that has caused us so much suffering? But how could we live without it? Everyday life is no longer familiar. In one of the documentary’s most harrowing scenes, the director films Vrej's grandmother's birthday. The family is in Yerevan, the father is fighting in the war. The children seem happy, there's a cake, and they lovingly kiss their grandmother. But Angela is elsewhere. Her eyes are teary, tired of a scene we feel she must have experienced before. Faced with the patriotic song that a determined Vrej ends up singing, the grandmother's hollow stare weighs heavily. With this simple juxtaposition, all becomes clear : the existential fatigue of too many birthdays spent far from home, of exhortations that no longer reach her. The pain of seeing children already possessed by war, and knowing nothing can be done. Violence and pain is passed on from generation to generation.
What is a country?
While Vrej and his siblings are not naïve, as war has denied them the promised insouciance of childhood, neither are they as aware as adults. This duality is particularly evident in the fact that they give the impression of both grasping, and not grasping, war. They understand it because they are confronted with it, because their home is far, because their dad is at the front, because they were taught at school that their land is to be defended. But they also don't seem to fundamentally realize that they may never be able to return home. For them, guns and fighting are still a playground game, and exile is temporary. In this sense, My Sweet Land resembles a coming-of-age film. Over the years, as the war and the threat of losing home become increasingly tangible to him, Vrej grows up and loses his smile. At school, he is no longer asked what defines a country but to defend it. Slowly, he is made into a soldier. It starts by learning how to identify mines, then how to put on a gas mask. Finally, there's the “kindergarten for the army”, a sort of summer camp where 13 year olds can learn to shoot machine guns and reload a rifle. The Republic of Artsakh prepares its children for war. Because war will always come, and if it doesn't rely on parents to populate the land and on children to defend it, how will it survive? With great mastery, and a gaze that seems neither to approve nor to condemn, Sareen Hairabedian plunges us into a never-ending malaise, that of her characters caught between the inability to return and the inability to leave.
Pauline Ciraci
