CURATORIAL STATEMENT
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The process of curating always begins with a complicated series of questions. To whom is the exhibition or event addressed? What message should it convey? How should the balance between art’s perennial two roles – to entertain and to challenge – be struck? There are no right answers, of course (although perhaps there are wrong ones). In the case of this festival, we’ve tried to strike a series of complicated balances – between audiences, between messages, and between entertainment and challenge. Our audiences are the Bay Area Armenian communities, on the one hand, and the Bay Area film, video and arts communities on the other. We are committed to presenting works to our Armenian communities that allow us to see ourselves – joyously, complexly, diversely, in all the ways usually denied to small communities like ours. But we’ve simultaneously committed to bringing works by Armenian artists to the attention of our arts communities. As artists and scholars, we often work in isolation, the only Armenians in earshot, as it were. Making more works by a wider range of artists visible to a larger arts community is a crucial role this festival can play. The matter of what message the festival could or should convey is similarly fraught – there are hundreds of very good, very plausible ways to have an Armenian film festival. For us the most important message we want to communicate to all our audiences is that the vibrant, surprising, rich breadth of excellent work by and about Armenians being made by current filmmakers is dazzling. It is startling in number, in style, in geography, in language … Against extraordinary odds, genuinely strong work is being made by filmmakers across the globe, by students and renowned artists. They make documentary, essay and fiction films of every imaginable style and length, in the most experimental and the most accessible forms on the contemporary film scene. Showing such a dizzying array of works has meant we’ve had to make difficult decisions, and we’ve had to turn down many works we’d have liked to present. But we chose to err on the side of breadth – without, of course, compromising on standards of excellence. Every single attendee. It’s nearly impossible to imagine anyone who could like films as radically different as Hrayr Anmahouni’s extremely experimental ode to Beirut, Bruitage, on the one hand, and Don Bernier’s traditional, TV style documentary on Elizabeth Tashjian, In a Nutshell, on the other. (Although I did, I must confess.) So, please, enjoy the festival. But dislike some of it, too. Go ahead – we won’t mind. Find us and tell us so, or drop us a note. If you have strong responses to the festival, we’ll know we’ve succeeded. Curatorial Team Thea Farhadian Hrayr Eulmessekian |