• MAYSLES BROTHERS DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION
• A STORY OF PEOPLE IN WAR AND PEACE
• QUEEN'S FILM THEATRE
  9.10PM - WEDNESDAY 28TH MARCH
• £5.50/£5.00 BUY TICKETS

In 1994 Vardan Hovhannisyan, a photographer, spent five days in the trenches during the Karabagh war, a conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan little discussed in the international press. By the time he had left, over half the soldiers in the trench where injured, a third of them dead.

Twelve years later a question from his son about his warring past prompts him to look for some of his surviving trench-mates and examine archive footage covering the entire experience. His intimate conversation's with the people he finds raises many fundamental questions about the human cost of war and how it changes the lives of those who not only must survive war but peacetime too. A Story of People in War and Peace is about as direct a piece of cinema as you can get.

"Hovhannisyan does not emphasise the political side of the conflict, but the psychological effects the war had on the young soldiers. He juxtaposes chaotic and terse frontline images of 12 years ago with panoramic shots in fixed frames of the beautiful scenery today. But all this calm is an illusion, as one soldier puts it."
IDFA 2006.

Dir. Vardan Hovhannisyan, 2006, Armenia, 70mins, Cert , Bars Media