France-based Armenia-born filmmaker Tamara Stepanyan simply opened the 78th version of the Locarno Movie Pageant with Within the Land of Arto, which stars Camille Cottin and Zar Amir and explores the collective trauma of Armenians. A unique sort of trauma, that of home violence, would be the focus of her subsequent movie, the inventive tells THR.
Since making a fiction quick about 15 years in the past, the filmmaker has made a reputation for herself with such documentaries as Embers and My Armenian Phantoms. Requested about the kind of film she’s going to work on subsequent, she says: “For me, cinema is cinema. There’s a really skinny line for me between documentary and fiction – I imply fiction the way in which I see it. One nourishes the opposite, one is impressed by the opposite. I like each immensely, and I’m positive I’ll proceed doing each in parallel.”
And he or she is. “I have already got an concept for a fiction movie that I wish to work on with one in every of my core co-writers of Arto,” Stepanyan shares. “Her identify is Romy [Coccia di Ferro]. I wish to write along with her about Armenia once more.” However “it’s too early” to debate subjects and themes, she tells THR.
She already filmed a documentary two years in the past, although, which she plans to begin enhancing in January. “I shot it in a spot referred to as Maison des Femmes, Home of Girls or Home for Girls, on the outskirts of Paris in St. Denis,” Stepanyan explains. “This place welcomes ladies who’ve gone by means of home violence and have traumas, together with mutilation and rape. This lovely place treats traumas by means of workshops, akin to pictures yoga, and dance. And I adopted three workshops over a yr – oriental dance, jewellery, and theater. So, once more, it’s about trauma, however one other sort of trauma.”
Concludes Stepanyan: “It’s a movie about therapeutic, about these ladies changing into those who resolve what their lives are like, those who management their future, those who restore and hopefully discover braveness to proceed life with out poisonous males round them.”
Stepanyan approached the ladies whereas coping with her personal trauma. “I used to be going by means of most cancers, and I used to be feeling that my physique was violated by illness, whereas their our bodies have been violated by males – fathers, uncles, husbands, boyfriends,” she shares. “All my initiatives are very private. I can not simply speak about one thing that I don’t care about. Home violence is likely one of the most horrible issues of recent life that’s nonetheless occurring. It isn’t the identical, however I felt very near the ladies, as a result of I used to be preventing my most cancers, they have been preventing their most cancers, which was the person, the violator.”
Concludes Stepanyan: “So, it’s a diary movie, a sort of diary of mine the place I’m going and spend the day with the ladies. It’s a private diary-oriented movie about therapeutic trauma.”