Harutyun Khachatryan’s Border awarded FIPRESCI prize

26.03.2010 16:48 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Armenian director Harutyun Khachatryan’s Border was
awarded FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) prize at
XXIV Freiburg Film Festival held on March 13-20, 2010.

Last year, Montevideo, Moscow and Tbilisi hosted retrospective
screenings of Harutyun Khachatryan’s films. This year, the film will
be screened in Spain, Israel and US.

Harutyun Khachatryan’s Border, is a 82-minute full-length feature film
where the filmmaker uses the story of an animal that’s lost its way as
a metaphor for the strife and mistrust in Eastern Europe after the
fall of the Soviet Union in this fusion of documentary and drama. In
the wake of the Armenian-Azeri conflict of the 1990’s, a number of
refugees find themselves working together on a farm near the Armenian
border; they often find themselves suspicious of those who claim to be
able help them, as well as one another. One day, one of the farmers
finds a buffalo in a nearby ditch; the animal looks tired and ill-fed,
and he brings it back to the farm in hopes of nursing it back to
health. But the other farm animals don’t know what to make of the
buffalo, while the dogs are openly hostile to the new arrival and many
of the farmhands, wary after years of having their nerves shattered by
war, reject the presence of the creature. Border premiered at the 2009
Rotterdam International Film Festival.