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Independent Armenia—living in the perpetual limbo of post-soviet Asia—hasn’t been able to escape an identity defined by past atrocities and aggressions suffered. Today’s generations are left reconciling the uneasy present they’ve been handed while dreaming of a future that doesn’t seem to exist. Young musicians in the budding scene in Yerevan have coined a genre that describes this suffocating state of being that also seeks to resist against the odds: Post-Panic. If ever there were a filmmaker to embody the Post-Panic spirit, it’s the late Maria Saakyan, whose premature passing in early-2018 left us mourning yet another lost Armenian future.
With tensions rising in the region yet again and another genocide of Armenians threatening, Spectacle presents this COVID-delayed retrospective of some of Maria’s films, all of which embody a rather materialist hope against a more existential dread.
From her early shorts to the (few) features she was able to make, a consistently haunting ethereality seeps in the muted tones of her images, exploring a matter-of-fact type of depression that finds comfort in objects and the body. Occasionally surreal, her work subtly confronts the disappointments of generations past, never forgetting their hardships all the while. Though Saakyan draws from the soviet masters that came before (Tarkovsky, Paradjanov, et al.), she was able to develop a raw yet pointed style that cements her as perhaps the most important Armenian filmmaker since Don Askarian.