Cineuropa chatted with Christine Haroutounian, whose debut film After Dreaming [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Christine Haroutounian
scheda film] has screened in the Regional Panorama competitive section of the 22nd Golden Apricot International Film Festival, after having premiered in Berlinale’s Forum section. The artist, who has a background in photography, broke down the origins of her film and explained how this narrative bursting with powerful images and concepts came into being.

Cineuropa: What Zodiac sign are you?
Christine Haroutounian: I'm a Gemini.

I ask because I heard the planet Neptune inspired the film.
Neptune was the entry point for me projecting myself into a feeling and a sense of dissolution. It's very hard to sit down and say: “I'm going to make an abstract film about memory, history and dislocation”. But what I could say is that, in my day-to-day life, I know all about that fantasy or desire to disappear. I don't know where it came from or what it meant, logically speaking, but it was powerful, potent. That was always the inspiration for the entire ethos and sense of the film. Neptune, in astrology, is the planet of delusion; the subconscious being lost in the abyss. It's the highest octave of art and love, but the kind of love you have with a hopeless drug addict that no one really understands. It's this total separation of one’s self from the world. The colour of Neptune – blue - pulled me in and captivated me. It was a magnetism that I constantly went back to but which had no real bearing or influence on what I could tell my cinematographer or my producers in terms of my reference points. I'd just say: “this is Neptune”. It was like chasing something with no reason or intellect behind it. It was purely about delving into that mystery, that void which devours you. Both fear and seduction at the same time.

You grew up in a diaspora. What image or memory did you have of Armenia as a child? How did you remember the country before coming here scouting for After Dreaming?
I came to Armenia for the first time when I was 16 or 17. I returned 10 years later to shoot my thesis film, World. After that, I came here to scout locations and to create After Dreaming. There was a time when I felt totally removed from the country. Now this place is very familiar and it’s become a real home for me. I’ve got my citizenship and my production company. I don't want to romanticize it, which people from the diaspora tend to do. I also have an elemental memory of this place that I was completely severed from, physically. I think my earliest memory goes back to my childhood when we were learning about Noah's ark. You hear these stories, and you think of them as stories. But for me, the discovery that there’s an actual place where this event took place, and that it happened in my birth country, affected my young psyche. Armenia is, in a sense, the original event for me. This is still the case because we operate outside of popular culture. I'm projecting myself in these biblical references; these forms that have nothing to do with story and logic – they use the intense tactility of the world to describe the beginning of everything. When you travel here and visit the Ararat Valley, it seems abandoned, at times, an unglamorous dump of a region where you might see rubbish blowing around this holy kind of site.

Your film also revolves around the question of individuality, of when a person becomes an individual rather than just part of a group, like an army unit or the circle of young girls who are learning how to behave properly in your film.
It’s at the root of everything I make: the question of what constitutes the self. In Armenia, in particular, we’re not so much about popular culture, but we’re very much about duty. I think it's really interesting because it establishes immediate limits and gives you something to push against. It gives you something to ground yourself in, for better or worse. It links in with my photography background. Before I was a filmmaker, I was an artist. I find the idea of self-portraiture - of capturing oneself and presenting oneself through images, which makes its way into the film in a scene of a portrait being taken at a wedding - so interesting because we naturally already find ourselves performing these roles, whether consciously or not. I told the brides in that scene that we’d pretend it was their wedding day and that we were taking a portrait of them. My assistant director just gave them a few directions around where the photographer was. They naturally started doing the things you see in the film. It was exciting for me, but it also broke my heart because there's an innocence to this act that we put on, in order to be presentable in Armenian society, for example, where there's this very conservative attitude towards marriage, family, God. There are also the things that are left unsaid, that are very much part of human nature, which link into broader questions or interests around pushing the boundaries of identity, of sexuality, and the roles we have to play.