Please tell us about the projects you worked on before making ‘The Mirror Parajanov’. How did you start, and how did you learn to make films?
I’m a director and producer of documentary films. I was a student of the great French critic Jean Douchet, New Wave theorist. I worked with the Lithuanian filmmaker Sharunas Bartas (Frost, Few of us, The House in selection at the Cannes and Berlin festivals, etc.), with the French Vincent Dieutre (Rome Désolée, Jaurès, Leçons de darkes, Jury Prize festivals of Locarno, Berlinale, FID Marseille). It was these demanding filmmakers and his meeting with the French feminist writer Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize winner for Literature and other anonymous people just as important in his construction who led him to make autobiographical films. An attempt to make up for a family memory in tatters, often painful, linked to exile, the Algerian war, the Russia of the Second World War, the working world, the gender of oneself. Neither exorcism, nor masochism, just an act of truth to leave a living trace that only cinema allows.
Tell us about ‘The Mirror Parajanov’. How do you describe it?
The Mirror Parajanov is about cinema through Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990), this genius filmmaker of Armenian origin who embodied a fierce resistance to the totalitarianism of the USSR and whose 2024 marks the celebration in the world of the centenary of his birth. Accused of homosexuality, art trafficking, incitement to suicide, corruption of officials, he will be locked up in prison for ten years, but he will continue to create with almost nothing. Thus, in only four films: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964) and Sayat Nova, the Color of Pomegranates (1969), The Legend of the Surami Fortress (1984) and Ashik-Kerib (1988), he became for Scorsese, Godard and other great filmmakers one of the greatest masters in the history of world cinema. My film begins as a pilgrimage to Yerevan in Parajanov's house, which has become his museum, I'm this French director of Russian origin who admires his work, and it turns into a mystical experience in search of the spirit of the Master.
Please tell us about your favorite filmmakers.
Even if I wanted to, I could not deny my origins and my attachment to Russia because this heritage comes from my grandmother who runs through most of my films. The discovery in the 90s of the cinema of Tarkovsky and Parajanov acted for me as a revelation for the young student a little lost that I was then. They allowed me to dream of this window open on Russia that through cinema I created for myself to try to repair what life did not offer me. Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov are my two major influences because they come from the land of my origins, because they tell timeless stories, because they have both reinvented cinema, because their films are much more than stories, they are visions, prayers, a world that no longer needs words, a world to feel more than to understand.
If you were given a good budget, what would be your ideal project?
I would like to make my new project, a suspense film about the last years of Andrei Tarkovsky's life, who died in 1986. One of the greatest filmmakers of all time. He was a friend of Parajanov. With Parajanov I dealt with the imprisonment of artists who wanted to be free in the USSR, with Tarkovsky I want to talk about the other possibility that artists who wanted to remain free had: exile. To tell the story of Tarkovsky's exile in Europe, in Italy, in France, in Sweden. His life separated from his son held hostage in the USSR, the filming of his last two films Nostalghia and The Sacrifice. A suspense film against the backdrop of the Cold War, like today's Russia is experiencing again.
Describe how you would ensure that production is on schedule. What steps would you take?
Cinema is an individual art that is practiced by several people. I think that you have to work with a production and technicians who share your vision and are there to give it the means to express itself. Thanks to money we have more time, thanks to technicians who are technical artists we can try to translate our intentions as best we can, sublimate it, do better than what we had planned, because cinema and life are linked for me and we do not write everything, we do not plan everything. It is also accidents, what is not planned that sometimes produces the most beautiful things. This is what I secretly hope to achieve in filming miracles!
What was the hardest part of making ‘The Mirror Parajanov’.
I started the project before the COVID pandemic. I stopped it because I could no longer travel. I then returned to Armenia to film but the director of the Parajanov museum who was helping me died of COVID. It is especially for him that I continued and that is why the film is dedicated to him. Then there was Russia's war against Ukraine which prevented me from filming in Ukraine. Finally Georgia where I went to meet Yuri Mechitov, Parajanov's photographer friend in the middle of the country's crisis. In short, this film took me almost five years and was crossed by multiple geopolitical upheavals. But the most difficult thing was to live up to my challenge: to recapture the spirit of Parajanov. And it is up to the spectators to tell me if I succeeded or not.
If possible, tell us about your next work. What plans do you have for your future work?
My new project is to make a film about the last years of the life of the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. He was a friend of Parajanov. This film will be the continuation of my film about Parajanov. After having dealt with an artist who had chosen to stay in the USSR and pay the price for his freedom of expression after decades of prison; I would like to evoke another choice, that of an artist in exile, another choice to be free during the time of the USSR.
コメント