1489 (2023, Shoghakat Vardanyan) | A film screening and discussion

Kino Nights is a new curated series of themed monthly screenings and conversations hosted by the Melikian Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. The series features present-day groundbreaking documentary and narrative cinema from Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, contextualized in timely conversations with scholars and artists. The screenings and conversations are free and open to all to attend.

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1489 | "My younger brother Soghomon, 21, a musician, was close to completing his mandatory military service when the Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) War flared up again on Sept. 27, 2020. He disappeared in the war zone without a trace on the 7th day. I had never studied filmmaking but the emotions overwhelming my family made me grab my phone and document our daily ordeal. We were just waiting for my brother, I had not planned to make a film. Hope and despair alternated over the 44 days of the War. I filmed my family for another 2 years, as we searched, waited, and wavered. Soghomon’s remains were coded 1489 – 'Body of individual missing in action.' Although bitter, this number provided closure, which many families still lack."

The screening will be followed by a conversation featuring: director Shoghakat Vardanyan (remotely); along with Hovig Artinian, doctoral student, School of Human Evolution and Social Change; Setrag Hovsepian, doctoral student, Mary Lou Fulton College; Irina Levin, Assistant Teaching Professor, Barrett, The Honors College; and Keith Brown, Director, The Melikian Center. 

The discussion will be facilitated by Luiza Parvu, Assistant Professor, and Toma Peiu, Faculty Associate in the Poitier Film School.

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Director Shoghakat Vardanyan was born in 1993 into a family of artists in Yerevan, Armenia. As a pianist, she has performed classical, academic, contemporary, and experimental collaborative work as a soloist, a part of chamber ensembles, and an accompanist in Armenia, the United States, Canada, and Europe. Since 2017, she has been playing free improvisations and became a part of the Contemporary Sound Orchestra of Yerevan (Pots and Drums). 1489 (2023) is her first film. It won the Best Feature Length documentary, as well as the FIPRESCI Prize at IDFA, the world's largest documentary film festival. Since then, it has been presented in dozens of festivals and venues around the world.

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In 2025, Kino Nights features bold films that address personal and collective trauma. Our line-up includes documentary and fiction films that touch on historical events that have left scars in the consciousness of the filmmakers, and their audiences. The works we present go beyond the descriptive to evoke the unthinkable and process the shock and horror without exploiting it, by using a distinct cinematic language. They create sensory experiences, spaces of shared imagination and affect that put audiences in fellowship with people, places and events of rupture, punctuated by violence, genocide, or catastrophe that reverberate long after they have unfolded.