Author: Antranik Varosian

Investment of 17 billion drams and creation of 668 jobs: Ministry of Economy signs agreements

Antranik Varosian

 20:34,

YEREVAN, JANUARY 12, ARMENPRESS:  The Armenian Ministry of Economy has signed agreements with four companies, planning to invest approximately 17 billion drams and create 668 jobs in the regions of Aragatsotn and Kotayk, as well as in the capital, Yerevan ("UM Agro" LLC, "Agropro" CJSC, "Europlast 999" LLC, " GNC Alpha" CJSC), the Minister of Economy Vahan Kerobyan wrote on social media.

''As part of the "Infrastructures for Investments" program, the Ministry of Economy will compensate the costs of roads, water supply, gas supply, electricity supply and telecommunication systems. Our goal is to encourage the investor and at the same time contribute to the improvement of infrastructures in the regions of the country," said Kerobyan.

Armenian Foreign Minister congratulates Cho Tae-Yul on his appointment as Foreign Minister of South Korea

Antranik Varosian

 20:59,

YEREVAN, JANUARY 12, ARMENPRESS:  Armenia's Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan has congratulated Cho Tae-Yul on his appointment as Foreign Minister of the Republic of Korea.

"I send my congratulations to H.E. Mr. CHO TAE-YUL on appointment as FM of Republic of Korea and best wishes for successful tenure. I look forward to working together to further deepen Armenian-Korean political dialogue, advance joint agenda and cooperation in multilateral fora," Mirzoyan said in a post on X.

Russian official visits Kapan to discuss plans to open consulate-general

Antranik Varosian

 11:17,

YEREVAN, JANUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. A Russian foreign ministry official has visited the Armenian town of Kapan to discuss Moscow’s plans to open a consulate-general there, the Russian Embassy in Armenia said in a press release.

The issue was discussed between Russian Foreign Ministry official Sergey Chashchikhin and Kapan Mayor Gevorg Parsyan.

The Russian official thanked the Kapan leadership for support.

The importance of establishing and developing close ties between Kapan and Russian cities was underscored.

Promising directions for cultural-humanitarian and trade-economic cooperation were discussed.

Israeli Defense Minister’s post-war Gaza plan: Palestinians to run civil affairs with global task force

Antranik Varosian

 11:44, 5 January 2024

YEREVAN, JANUARY 5, ARMENPRESS. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Thursday presented a four-pronged plan for how to handle the Gaza Strip after the ongoing war with Hamas ends, the Times of Israel reports.

The plan, which was set to be presented in discussions on Thursday evening in both the limited war cabinet and the broader security cabinet, does not include a role for the Palestinian Authority, and it does not provide for resettling Gaza.

The plan marks the first time a senior Israeli official has laid out a detailed blueprint for the Strip after the war, but it does not yet represent official policy, as there are stark differences over it within the coalition.

Gallant told journalists before the meeting that his framework is based on the assumption that Hamas is no longer in control of Gaza and does not pose a security threat to Israel. It focuses on the civil governance of the strip, with Israel retaining military control on the borders, and the right to take any military and security action necessary inside Gaza.

“Gaza residents are Palestinian, therefore Palestinian bodies will be in charge, with the condition that there will be no hostile actions or threats against the State of Israel,” the Times of Israel quoted Gallant as saying.

While Gallant’s insistence on full Israeli security control and freedom of action is shared by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Gallant plan’s emphasis on Palestinian civilian control over Gaza, with no Israeli civilian presence there, has angered hardline coalition partners. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose desire for renewed Jewish settlement in Gaza is ruled out in Gallant’s plan, said Thursday that he firmly opposed it. “Gallant’s ‘day after’ plan is a re-run of the ‘day before’ October 7,” Smotrich said. “The solution for Gaza requires out-of-the-box thinking and a changed conception.” Smotrich repeated his contention that a solution for Gaza involves “encouraging voluntary emigration [of Gazans] and full [Israeli] security control including renewed settlement.”

The Israeli defense minister’s plan, which has already been presented to the US administration and discussed with other allies, has four “pillars” for civil rule in post-war Gaza.

First, Israel will coordinate and plan an oversight role in civil governance, and be responsible for inspecting incoming goods.

Second, a multinational task force, led by the US in partnership with European and moderate Arab nations, will take responsibility for running civil affairs and the economic rehabilitation of the Strip.

Third, Egypt, which is noted as a “major actor” in the plan, will take responsibility for the main civilian border crossing into the Gaza Strip, in coordination with Israel.

Fourth, existing Palestinian administrative mechanisms will be maintained, provided that the relevant officials are not affiliated with Hamas. Local authorities that currently deal with sewage, electricity, water and humanitarian aid distribution will continue to operate, in collaboration with the multinational task force.

In Memory of Norik Y. Astvatsaturov

Antranik Varosian
January 2, 2024 Guest Contributor Obituaries 0

Norik Y. Astvatsaturov

Norik Yegishevich Astvatsaturov passed away peacefully at the age of 76 in Wahpeton, North Dakota on December 30, 2023, at 5:45 am from a long battle with cancer. He was surrounded by his loving family. His last words on this earth were, “I’m not afraid.”

A celebration of Norik’s life will be held at Evergreen United Methodist Church on Tuesday, January 23, 2024, at 10:30 a.m., at 1120 Evergreen Court Wahpeton, North Dakota with visitation starting at 9:30 a.m. A funeral service for Norik will be held in Yerevan, Armenia later in the spring.

Everyone who met Norik knew him as he was—soul of the party, jokester, teaser, family toastmaster, Armenian barbecue aficionado, U.S. and Armenia’s national treasure, jaw-droppingly talented award-winning artist, grandchildren’s giggle-instigator and the best advice and hug-giver in the world. He loved sitting outside at the lake, carving wood and creating beauty all around him. Norik was never without candy in his pocket and a newsboy hat on his head. He loved keeping in touch with family spread around the world and maintained a network for decades, ensuring that his children had a connection to family in Armenia. Norik loved a good, loud laugh, good quality tools and a big dinner party. Above all else, he spent his life dedicated to his children and his grandchildren, who he was so proud of. He was a strong, simple, yet such a complicated man, and the world is so much dimmer without him.

Norik was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, former USSR, on December 22, 1947, to his parents Yegishe and Tamara, the oldest of three. From an early age, Norik loved visual art and expressed himself through wood carving and drawing. After returning from compulsory Soviet military service in 1968, he became an apprentice to a metal repoussé artist in Baku, soon becoming a master himself. The metal art he produced, although rooted in traditional and often religious Armenian art history, was mostly based in commercial and Soviet themes. Even under the fear of prosecution, Norik produced customary and traditional decorative metal items such as crosses, family Bible covers and wedding jewelry boxes with precious and semi-precious metals and stones.

During his time as a master in Baku, Norik met Irina Adamyan, and they married in 1977. Norik and Irina had two children: Anna born in 1978 and Mikhail born in 1984. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Soviet Union collapsed, and simmering ethnic hatred toward minority Armenians in Azerbaijan resurfaced. Ethnic violence ensued against Christian Armenians by the predominantly Muslim Azerbaijanis that echoed the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and massacres of Armenians of 1918, which his family survived over and over again. Norik and his family fled Baku in 1989, settling in blockaded, cold and hungry Armenia for three years, trying to survive.

Norik worked as a machinist in a crystal factory, under extreme conditions and stress. There was no food or electricity during the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan and not many prospects for the future. The family took a chance at a better life and applied for refugee status, and after 2.5 years were settled in Wahpeton, North Dakota in 1992. While they were forced to leave most of their possessions behind, Norik brought his art tools: his hammer and nail punches. He said, “A good artist is one who can carry all the tools he needs in his pocket.”

To support his family, Norik worked as a machinist in Wahpeton at the Primewood factory for two decades, while also continuing his art, making items cherished by the Armenian Diaspora in the United States. His work is known not only for extraordinary technique with simple tools but for the meaning and feeling he infuses into his art. He once said, “Technique without meaning is lifeless.”

During his life, Norik demonstrated love and deep respect for his adoptive United States and instilled the same in his children toward their ancestral homeland of Armenia. He worked tirelessly to teach and share his Armenian art and its message with Americans and the Armenian diaspora nationally and internationally. He taught, gave workshops, presented at festivals and universities, exhibited and was a recipient of fellowships from the North Dakota Council on the Arts, the Fund for Folk Culture, the Bush Foundation and the prestigious U.S. National Endowment for the Arts “National Heritage Fellowship.” In 2017, Norik was awarded an “Arshile Gorky” medal from the President of Armenia that recognizes achievement in the arts within the Armenian Diaspora.

Norik is preceded in death by his parents, Yegishe and Tamara Astvatsaturov. He is survived by his wife, Irina Astvatsaturova; his daughter, Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte, her husband John Turcotte and their children Armen and Evangeline of Westbrook, Maine; his son, Mikhail Astvatsaturov, his wife, Cassandra Astvatsaturova and their children Nicholai, Alexander, Artem and Ruben of Williston, North Dakota; and his sister Nora and brother Novik and his family, both of Boston, Massachusetts.

In lieu of flowers, please donate to Norik’s favorite charitable organization Anna Astvatsaturian Foundation at www.astvatsaturian.org to support Armenian children and indicate “for Norik” in your donations.




Film: ‘Amerikatsi’ Review: A Soulful Armenian Comedy-Drama About Cultural Yearning

Antranik Varosian
Dec 28 2023

Writer-director-actor Michael A. Goorjian crafts a timely metaphor for displacement in Armenia’s shortlisted Oscar entry.

Three decades after the 1915 Armenian Genocide, an optimistic American Armenian returns to his Sovietized homeland, only be thrown in prison under flimsy circumstances. From his squalid jail cell, he peers daily into the home and inner life of one of his Armenian prison guards, and inadvertently finds the cultural connection he’d been searching for. This broad premise informs the sentimental comedy-drama of “Amerikatsi” (or “The American”), Armenia’s shortlisted international Oscar submission. Written and directed by Michael A. Goorjian, who also stars in the leading role, it’s a moving work about diasporic yearning, coming to us as history repeats itself, after more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians were forced to flee Nagorno-Karabakh earlier this year.

The movie’s dreamlike prologue follows a young Armenian boy escaping the brutality of the Ottoman Army during World War I, peering out of a tiny hole in an ornate luggage trunk. The interior of this box is embossed with the serene image of Mount Ararat which, while located in modern Turkey, holds deep significance as a national symbol for the Armenian people. Decades later, this boy — now a middle-aged Poughkeepsie local, “Charlie” Bakhchinyan (Goorjian) — takes advantage of Joseph Stalin’s program to repatriate displaced Armenians, but stumbles headfirst into a Soviet family comedy of sorts, though he’s none the wiser.

After assisting the disgruntled Armenian wife of a high-ranking Soviet official, brewing jealousies and crossed wires lead to Charlie — who’s fluent in English, speaks scattered Armenian and knows not a lick of Russian — being locked up for the crime of wearing a polka dotted tie. Before long, his daily routine involves stale bread, hard labor and propping himself up at his window to gaze into the small but humble home of one of his prison guards, echoing his defining childhood event, as though he were doomed to live life at a remove and view it through a pinhole. However, what begins as mere entertainment for Charlie eventually blossoms into a portrait of cultural isolation, as he slowly picks up on bits of Armenian culture and customs from afar.

As Charlie (who the prison guards nickname “Charlie Chaplin”), Goorjian brings a robust comedic energy to the screen. He would feel at home in a film by Jacques Tati as he creates humor through his physicality, warping the fabric of any scene the moment he steps into a room. His animated performance goes hand-in-hand with his initial conception of Charlie as a stereotype of an American visiting another country, drawing attention through his loud brashness and his ignorance of local customs. In fact, Goorjian — an American of Armenian descent — uses this preconception of Americanness to create a hapless, helpless protagonist whose unbridled optimism seems naive, before he unwraps the character layer by layer, revealing him to be defiantly hopeful in spite of adversity. Though comical at the outset, his performance ends up soulful and devastating. When Charlie grows thinner and more gaunt, an unspoken element of the drama is whether or not he’ll be able to hold on to the glimmer of light in his eyes.

Goorjian gives that light physical form through his filmmaking. His story is born through the back-and-forth cutting between Goorjian’s own subtle, distinctly “cinematic” performance — in which his eyes reflect comfy living-room lights in the distance — and the stage-like gesticulations of Hovik Keuchkerian and Narine Girgoryan, who play the bickering Armenian couple whose daily life becomes Charlie’s soap opera. The very act of looking becomes enrapturing, as though “Amerikatsi” were a film about the magic of movies (à la “Cinema Paradiso”) but with the projector and the silver screen stripped away.

Eventually, the two opposing modes of visual storytelling at its core (one distinctly intimate, the other distant and observational) come into explosive contact like matter and antimatter, as the idea of art metaphorically gazing back at its viewer takes distinctly literal form. It’s a moment that not only twists the screws of Goorjian’s zany plot, but feels like lightning as it unfolds, a tonal oscillation mirrored by composer Andranik Berberyan’s constant use of both upbeat comedic jazz and wistful Armenian folk.

If there’s criticism to be lobbied at Amerikatsi it’s that it remains mostly unconcerned with the brutality wrought upon Charlie and his fellow prisoners, or with the psychology of its numerous Armenian guards who oppress their kinsmen at the state’s behest. Instead, it remains tethered to Charlie’s perspective (often to a fault). And while holding back on these more rigorous explorations allows it to blossom as a “feel-good” film about atrocity (in the vein Roberto Benigni’s “Life is Beautiful”), Goorjian also employs a mischievous sleight of hand when it comes to these ideas. They remain mere implications in the movie’s margins for the most part, but he causes them to come crashing down all at once, in a brief but powerful moment late into the runtime.

What might seem mawkish on paper ends up deeply affecting in practice. Like British playwright Tom Stoppard, whose recent production “Leopoldstadt” masterfully explored his connection to his Jewish-Austrian roots — and his separation from them after the Holocaust — Goorjian reaches deep into Armenian cultural memory and searches for his place within it, as an artist adrift from his family’s culture and homeland, forced to peer at it and learn about it from a distance. He even dedicates the film to his grandfather, a survivor of the 1915 genocide, thus framing the story as an intimate fantasy of reclaiming the parts of himself which were ripped from his hands long before he was born. In the few moments his history and culture finally feel within reach, “Amerikatsi” overflows with nostalgia and unabashed tenderness. A balm for even the most hardened souls.

  • Production: (Republic of Armenia) A Variance Films release of a People of AR Production, in association with Palodeon Pictures, H&H Films, AnEva Prods., the National Cinema Center of Armenia. Producers: Patrick Malkassian, Sol Tryon, Arman Nshanian. Executive producers: Patrick Malkassian, Serj Tankian, Vartan Barsoumian.
  • Crew: Director, writer: Michael Goorjian. Camera: Ghasem Ebrahimian. Editor: Michael Goorjian, Mike Selemon. Music: Andranik Berberyan. Songs: Miqayel Voskanyan.
  • With: Michael Goorjian, Hovik Keuchkerian, Nelli Uvarova, Mikhail Trukhin, Narine Gigoryan, Jean-Pierre Nshanian, Aram Karakhanyan, George Hovakimyan. (English, Russian, Armenian dialogue)


France expels two Azerbaijan diplomats for ‘reciprocity’

Antranik Varosian

 10:30,

YEREVAN, DECEMBER 28, ARMENPRESS. France has declared two employees of Azerbaijan's embassy persona non grata in a move of "reciprocity", Reuters reported citing the French Foreign Ministry.

Azerbaijan's foreign ministry on Tuesday declared two employees of France's embassy persona non grata over "conduct that is not compatible with their diplomatic status".

The French foreign ministry said in a statement it "categorically denies" the allegations, noting it had summoned Azerbaijan's ambassador "to communicate these elements".

Armenian Film ‘Amerikatsi’ Earns Historic Oscar Shortlist Spot

Antranik Varosian
 bnn 
Hong Kong – Dec 25 2023

In a remarkable leap forward for Armenian cinema, the film ‘Amerikatsi’ has earned a spot on the Oscar shortlist for the first time in the nation’s history. The announcement came from the National Cinema Center of Armenia, marking a pivotal milestone for the country’s film industry in its quest for global recognition.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the body responsible for the Oscars, released its shortlists across numerous categories. Among these, the International Feature Film category has sparked global interest. The Armenian film ‘Amerikatsi’, directed by Michael Gurgian, is one of the top 15 international feature films being considered for the esteemed award, holding its own amidst heavy competition.

‘Amerikatsi’s’ inclusion in the Oscar shortlist is more than just an accolade for the film itself. It symbolizes a significant leap forward for the Armenian film industry, bringing it into the limelight of international cinema. It’s the result of a consistent and dedicated effort by Armenian filmmakers to craft compelling narratives that resonate with a global audience.

The official Oscar nominees will be announced on January 23, 2024, an eagerly anticipated event for the film fraternity worldwide. The final Oscars ceremony is scheduled for March 10, 2024. As we await the final list of nominees, the inclusion of ‘Amerikatsi’ on the shortlist has already achieved a victory for Armenian cinema, demonstrating its blossoming potential on the global stage.