The audience in London warmly reacts to the debut film of Russian stage
manager, Armenian by origin, Maria Sahakyan

arminfo
2007-11-03 13:19:00

ArmInfo. The British audience warmly reacted to the debut film "Mayak"
(lighthouse) of the young Russian stage manager, Armenian by origin,
Maria Sahakyan. The film was staged at London’s film festival. As RIA
Novosti reports, the film of the 27 years old graduate of the
"All-Union State Institute of Cinematography" tells about residents of
a village in the Caucasus, which appeared in the zone of a military
conflict. The central character of the film-Lena comes to the village
to take her grandmother and grandfather from, but instead, she stays
there with them. Teams from Russia, Armenia, Georgia and Serbia worked
on the film. It was shot in M. Sahakyan’s homeland-Armenia, but the
exact location of the action is specified nowhere in the film. "This
was a principled position",-M. Sahakyan said. "In essence, the scenario
was written about Sukhumi, about the war between Abkhazia and Georgia.
I once left Armenia, since Yerevan was in blockade because of the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict".

M. Sahakyan considers a great piece of luck to work with such great
actors, as Sofiko Chiaureli and Sos Sarkisyan in her very first
full-length film. According M. Sahakyan, for them, too, this is an
important topic, because Sofiko lives in Georgia and Sos-in Armenia.
"They are "the grandmother and the grandfather", which didn’t leave
their homeland. They see no need to leave it. So that, basically, the
film presents the reality", she said.