The return of the great poet

To the anniversary of one of the best documentaries in the world - Harutyun Khachatryan - a retrospective at the Moscow Film Festival

Films have been making about him for a long time.

Harutyun Khachatryan returns documentary cinema poetry, plastic, expressiveness. In his paintings without words - the spirit of time, including the disappeared. The alloy of epic and momentary, eternal and everyday.

And in the author’s gaze - bitterness and wisdom, sadness, humor, pain and love - first of all. But this is an honest look, and the officials in Soviet times rotted him for the "ugliness" of the showed life. For me, the strongest film of Khachatryan is the poem “Border” (2009) about a freedom -loving buffalo, who does not want to put up with the cordons that people built. I watched the picture for a long time, but I see several episodes with my own eyes. In one of them, a border farm burns. And people - adults and children - risking their lives, from fire to heaven they drag distraught animals one after another. In another, they cut a fellow Buwolitsa, and she looks with a wild gaze. In the third - the violator of the borders lies dead on a narrow “noe” strip between the iron wire. And next to her, her calf tries to get to her feet.

The retrospective was opened by the film "The Return of the Poet." At first glance, something phantasmagoric: “Stone Guest” is the statue of the poet and philosopher Jivani moves along Armenia past small villages and cities, calmly looking at the majestic Ararat and his fellow citizens.

And on Armenia itself - with its poverty and beauty.

And at the beginning of the film - the birth of a monument from stones and clay, which the artist’s bare feet are wrinkled.

Occupation of excess flies out of a giant block. This is a cycle of art as a cycle of life itself.

But the poet is already standing, crossing his hands, with a straight back, as befits a poet ... on a truck. He rides, and fellow citizens admire his proud look - an unexpected mobile “exhibition”. Here is the bridge, the driver slows down and stops ... No, the poet will not pass. And after all, the poet will not bow his head even for a moment. So majestically will arrive in Akhalkalaki - to the place of his future life. By the way, Harutyun Khachatryan himself was also born in Akhalkalaki - the Armenian enclave in Georgia.

The film was shown on many international film festivals: from Rotterdam to Karlovy Vare.

The director could not come to the opening of the retrospective, it overtook the virus. I wish him health. And in the coming months, the Retrospectives of the Cinema Harutyun Khachatryan - in the center of Pompidu and at the International Film Festival in Tutlouraide.

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