DOCUMENTARY FILM ON KARABAKH WAR WINS PRESTIGIOUS TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL AWARD

We just read that the documentary film "A Story of People in War and Peace", directed by Vardan Hovhannisyan , has won the Best New Documentary Filmmaker Award at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

The buzz regarding this hard-hitting but poignant film, the first for Vardan Hovhannisyan, has really been positive from mostly all who have seen it. It is not a documentary about the war itself, but rather it weaves a narrative around the experiences of a few individuals who fought in the war on the Armenian side and how their lives were forever changed as a result.

The Tribeca Film Festival web page describes the film as:

A deeply personal meditation on the horrors of war and its effects is shown through the eyes of Armenian journalist Vardan Hovhannisyan. Weaving together footage from his country's 1994 conflict with neighboring Azerbaijan over the Nagorno- Karabakh region, Hovhannisyan creates a devastating portrait of lasting damage inflicted by the battlefield. In English and Armenian.

The film was produced by Bars Media, an independent film studio company in Yerevan, Armenia. Mr. Hovhannisyan, the film's director, is also the founder and president of the company.

In the film we learn that in the early 1990's with the war in Karabakh in full swing, Vardan went to the front lines as a journalist and cameraman. His 70 minute documentary shows only a tiny portion of the images he witnessed and the people he met while there. He was also taken hostage twice during the conflict.

An extended version of the film is in the works and should be out by year's end. The producers also say that the current version of the film will premier in Armenia sometime this summer.

What a one-two knockout punch. First "Screamers " and now "A Story of People in War and Peace".