LIGHTS, CAMERA, AUCTION: ARMENIA PRIVATIZES A HISTORIC FILM STUDIO. WILL IT HELP REVIVE THE RICH CINEMA TRADITION OF THE CAUCASUS?
By Tom Birchenough

Moscow Times
Aug 26 2005

As Russia waits for any real development in transferring parts of
its film industry into private hands — the partial privatization of
Moscow’s Gorky Film Studio, announced this spring and heralded as
the first step in that process, has been indefinitely postponed —
other countries in the region are pressing ahead, in an effort to
reinvigorate local film industries as well as to attract international
productions.

In 2004, private investors took ownership of the Vilnius-based
Lithuanian Film Studio, and last month, Armenia headed in a similar
direction. Yerevan’s historic Armenfilm, founded in 1923 and long part
of the rich film tradition of the Caucasus, passed into the hands of
the well-connected local media group CS Media City, or CSMC, and its
subsidiary Armenia Film Studios, for the sum of 350 million drams
(just over $750,000).

Cinema in the Caucasus has always straddled the present-day national
borders, and though Armenia has a considerable reputation in film,
it’s often been dwarfed by neighboring Georgia, where directors,
especially those from the generation of the 1950s and 1960s, earned
particular fame.

For instance, Armenfilm is named in honor of Amo Bek-Nazarov, a
Soviet actor and director whose career began before the Bolshevik
Revolution. Although of Armenian descent, Bek-Nazarov played a
major role in Georgian silent film, and one of his best known works,
“Pepo” from 1935, unfolds in 19th-century Tiflis, though it features
an almost exclusively Armenian cast. Boundaries are further blurred
by the fact that Georgia’s state film production body, Goskinprom,
actually started in Baku, now the capital of Azerbaijan.

National loyalties are relative, indeed: One of Yerevan’s most
prominent museums may honor Sergei Paradzhanov, the censored and
once-imprisoned creator of Soviet-era classics such as “Color of
Pomegranates,” who died in the city in 1990, but the director rarely
worked in the country and is more often linked to Georgia and Ukraine.

Over the last decade, as Armenia went through war and dire poverty, the
situation took a distinct turn for the worse. Armenfilm’s peak output
of up to 10 feature films a year during the 1970s and 1980s dropped to
almost nothing. In 2004, its state budget funding was a mere $600,000.

Now, despite its august history and continuing difficulties,
priorities for the newly privatized studio look more than up-to-date,
especially in promoting lower-budget production using digital filming
equipment, which could give greater flexibility to the studio’s new
management by removing the need for difficult laboratory processing.
“Digital cinematography … [offers the] possibility to reduce the
gap between countries with extremely developed film industries and
countries where annually only a couple of movies are being shot,”
wrote Edgar Baghdasaryan, the director of Armenia Film Studios,
in an online statement.

Progress should certainly be helped by the fact that the venture is
supported by two highly influential figures in Armenia, with friendly
links to the country’s president, Robert Kocharyan. Local businessman
Bagrat Sargisyan is working alongside philanthropist Gerard Cafesjian,
a U.S. citizen of Armenian descent who opened a brand-new arts center
in Yerevan last year. The two also control three local television
stations.

Though the price of the deal may look on the low side, CSMC has
pledged to invest as much as $66 million in the studio over the next
10 years. In addition, it has promised to support four new local
feature films a year, as well as associated short-film and animation
work. The first fruits of the media company’s work, in the form of
two local productions, “Arshile” and “Mariam,” are already under way.