There Was, There Was Not – Interview with Film Director Emily Mkrtichian

Listen here. The following transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity:

Hey, my name is Rachael Sampson from Borrowing Tape, and I'm here with Emily Mkrtichian to talk to her about her latest documentary, There Was, There Was Not, which follows the lives of four feminist heroines from Artsakh before, during, and after the genocidal war in 2020.

Emily, welcome, and thank you for sitting down with me today. Congrats. This documentary is so affecting and important, not only from the perspective of education, but for immortalizing Artsakh's history and memory, which brings me to my first question. When you began filming this documentary about these inspiring women, I'm sure you never imagined you'd also be capturing a war. What did the blueprints of your original film look like? And how does that compare to the final cut that we see today?

Yeah, first of all, just so grateful to you for wanting to have this conversation and for watching the film. What a beautiful intro. Originally, when I started making the film, which I'm always surprised to say it was almost 10 years ago, I started in 2016. It began after making a short film about the first group of women in Artsakh, who were allowed to go out as D-Miners, so their work was to go into minefields and dig up bombs from the war 25 years ago, to make sure people could be safe and not accidentally step on one. And with them, I was inspired by the complexity of these women. I had originally thought of them as feminist figures. But once I spent time with them, I realized they were actually these very embedded members of their families and their communities, and they were doing dangerous work to keep their family safe and to provide for their families. They're all single mothers, and they really believed in the way that they could work for their community.  So there's this complexity in this post-conflict situation that I hadn't expected or was very intrigued by. I'm a member of the Armenian diaspora, and my great-grandparents were disconnected from their lands two generations back. All of the time I spent in Artsakh just showed me these people had this really intense connection to this place that I felt was really missing from my life through my history of displacement. I never really grew up feeling connected to the US or to America. There was this fervent desire to be there and experience the place and show it to other people, and that really drew me in.  So working from those kinds of moments of curiosity and personal connection, I found these four different women through different means. Some of them were friends of friends, and some of them I encountered while doing work in Artsakh or just spending time there. I wanted to work with them to actually create these large-scale installation pieces that were based on the stories that they were telling about themselves, which were in stark contrast to the stories that their communities were telling about them. Originally, the film was an observational verité piece that hinged on a creative act.  And then, of course, in 2020, everything changed.

Wow. It must have been incredibly difficult to see the subjects of your film go through such an unimaginable loss.  We were able to witness that grief within the work, but how did that affect you personally? What was your mental health like during and after this process?

Oh, that's such a hard question to answer because so much of this film is subsuming myself to the work of watching and supporting. There was never a lot of time for me to reflect on my own experience and engagement.  I remember when people would ask me about the war, I would always give anecdotes involving the four women in the film, and something that happened to us. I think that making this film was a way for me to attempt to make some sense out of the things that I witnessed. I grew up in the US. I grew up in a very safe place. I'm not a journalist who's been exposed to conflict or trained for those situations. Filming during such a dangerous armed conflict was a very new and life-changing experience for me. Understanding what it's really like to be on the ground in those situations, which unfortunately right now are not original, is something that is taking place around the world. They're horrific. This film, in the way that it allows the viewer to understand my relationship to these women through the camera, through our own conversation and dialogue, I think it tries to address that; what it's like to have something like this happen to you, and then also witness something like this. I was having a conversation this morning with someone about, and this is also for me, it's something that I know that my generations past in my own lineage have experienced. It was also a full circle moment for me to think about the experience of my great grandparents and what they've passed down to me and now for me as someone who's becoming the storyteller, the transmitter of information, what I want to pass on — whether that be a film or a story to my child — or something that I share with a friend.

As this is such a precious personal film, which took six years to make, and is shot with a very empathetic and caring lens. How did you find taking on the festival circuit, which can be rather competitive?

Wow, these are such great questions, because I'm just in the middle of reflecting on all of these things. Something very strange happens when a personal creative work goes out into the world. Number one, there's a distancing between the thing that you have been in the process of making for so long, and then it, as an object that is seen externally by other people. There's also the moment where that object enters an industry or a machine. There are all sorts of structures in place that have nothing to do with your personal experience of making the work, and you have to start to navigate. There were a lot of really beautiful moments.  As this film was making its way out into the world, I premiered it when I was seven months pregnant, and had one of the women from the film at my side the whole time. We had a bottle of wine that was made from grapes that were grown on the soil in Artsakh, and we said a toast to each other. When it premiered in Armenia at the International Film Festival there, I brought my two-month-old across the world, and we did it together. All the women were able to come to the screening. It was recognized with these really beautiful awards. So even in the release of this film, there's been a real mingling of the personal and the professional. I've really tried to just allow that to happen, and also to brace myself for a really unknown process of the way a piece of artwork, a creative work, navigates something that feels very separate from it, which is awards, press, [and] theatrical openings. All of these things that we're doing are all very new to me. I'm just trying to do it the way that the four women in the film would be proud of. With people I trust, with people who have the right ethics and who I want to collaborate with, with family, and with community, all of that has been really important.

One of the biggest takeaways for me was the pockets of wisdom and the amount of little throwaway comments that these women would make that actually have so much weight. The one that sticks out in my mind the most is when Siranush says we have to stay beautiful no matter what.  And that got me thinking about how women have so much grace within them that even in the face of war, we are able to carry ourselves with resilience and strength that's overwhelmingly admirable and not often reflected within masculinity. I wanted to know if there was a specific quote or a small moment from the film that goes around your head that you keep unpacking because it's so much bigger than intended.

Yeah, absolutely. First of all, to that comment, what a beautiful observation, because I really think of people in my family when I think of that comment. There's a moment where Siranush is actually having to pack up her stuff and flee, because the bombing has gotten so bad, and she's like, "Doesn't matter, you got to make your bed, you got to get everything tidy, you got to keep everything in place". I really identify with that in my own family. It doesn't matter if you don't have enough money. It doesn't matter what the situation is; you hold your head up and you do things with integrity and dignity. There's something really important in that, no matter the circumstances or the way that the outside world might see you, you internally hold your head high, and I really see Siranush doing that. I see women as really the holders of that. The reminders that I learned from my grandma, from my aunts, it's like a stubborn internal insistence on the dignity of your existence, despite what anything around you might say, or the world might throw at you.  As far as other things that I think about a lot in the film, there's so many. From a conversation this morning, a funny comment by Sosé in the beginning, when she's training this group of young kids in judo, and she's going through the main tenets that are not always about physical strength, they're often about internal mental spiritual strength. She's talking about how the pain of the body is fleeting, and it can be alchemized into something else. I think about that a lot. I actually go back to her spiritual tenets a lot because Sosé — in the film and in real life — is such a strong and unwavering person. I change my mind a lot. I really go with the flow. I'm in the air a lot. And Sosé - you could show up 10 years ago and 10 years into the future, and she'll tell you the exact same thing about what she thinks and what she believes. I just have a really great respect for that. Her entire world was ripped out from under her, and she hasn't lost hope, and she hasn't lost her belief.

You were able to juxtapose these horrific and heavy themes with a sororal and gentle demeanor, and that's clear in the footage and even in the edit, all of which results in a very powerful film. The awful, heavy themes of war and genocide were contrasted with the way you executed the documentary. We just saw so much care. Was that a conscious decision?

Yeah, it was really intentional on a lot of levels. I had been filming for so many years before the war broke out, but being very insistent that this actually is not a film about war. War happens to the four women, the four main characters, but it's not a film about war. It's not about war defining their lives.  And the first 40 minutes of the film are really an ode to this place, like this really aesthetically striking, fervently joyful, very unique country. The people who live there — despite the fact that you see each of the women in the beginning of the film struggling against something that they would like to change or something that they would like to achieve — there's this backdrop of just a simple joy that runs through everything. That's what I remember about that place. It was really important to me that the film wasn't an aside, and that it wasn't just a footnote in the history of this place. That is the definition of this place. And so that, plus my real lived relationship to these four women and the difficulty that I had in holding a camera through some of these moments, I think was also an access point to something that could counter what you do see in the film, which is some horrific destruction. What I saw those women doing was creating relationships of support and care. In a way, my intermingled existence in the film as the filmmaker is a mirror for that, and is a mirror for the way that they care for the people around them.  I hope it helps you understand that these are not simply four victims of a tragedy. I really didn't want this film to ask for sympathy for these four women because what I really believe is that they have so much to teach us. We're living in a time where we're seeing so much conflict and mass displacement, and you don't know where that's going to happen next. There's so much uncertainty in our lives, and the fact that these four women could experience what they experienced and continue to wake up the next day, continuing to say, How can I be of service to my family? How can I be of service to my community? It's such a model of strength for all of us.

Now that the film has been seen by select crowds prior to its main release, and we can often learn so much more from the audience, have you received any standout feedback that's made you consider the work in a different way?

I love these questions so much. I think actually what I was startled by, surprised by, or pleasantly surprised by is that you toil away on this thing in isolation for a bunch of years. I was really lucky to have an incredible editor, Alexandria Bombach, who I think just so clearly saw what I wanted to do and was a struggle to do, which is to make a piece that could somehow be cathartic, could offer the idea of a story or storytelling or documentation and relationships as an antidote to what we were seeing and what we witnessed. I've been just so wonderfully surprised by how that just comes through in the film and how people come up to me afterward. I really understand that from this piece — your questions really show it. It's complete magic and alchemy that you can work towards something like that in subtle ways, and that it can be just legible in the work that you make. It's vulnerable and beautiful, and it really gives me so much respect for this medium that it's possible. Um, the other thing that, um, I've been like very humbled by is that especially with Armenian audiences or Armenian, um, or audiences from this region, like from the middle East, from the SWANA region, um, when they watch it, I often get the comment that like, you know, in particular with people who know about Artsakh since this happened, I've spent so much time trying not to think about it because it's so painful. This film gave me this two-hour stretch of time where I could relive that place, and I could see the beauty of it again. I could watch what happened in a community with other people in a theater, and have this cathartic experience. That has actually been really helpful for us to be able to witness it in this way, and then sit in a theater together and have a discussion about it. Something about that has also been done within my community, and it has worked a little bit of magic.

You mentioned before that you are now a mother. Congratulations.  I have a slightly similar question: Has motherhood had an influence on the way you now view and create art? Has this life-changing experience impacted your perception of the film at all?

Yeah, absolutely. I got pregnant. I was pregnant in the edit, and that experience gave me this unique obsession with an idea of transmission. I was thinking about how experiences like the war and ethnic cleansing imprint on your body and in your DNA, and I was gonna pass that on to my child, and I was feeling very scared and guilty about that.  But then I remembered that whatever it was that my grandmothers had passed to me came alive in the period where I was in the most danger. It wasn't like they were just passing me trauma. It was like they were transmitting information and knowledge. I was thinking, Oh, I'm gonna pass this very important information on to my child. That's fundamental to our culture and who we are. Making the film was a balm for me because I had many moments where I was like: Should I even make this? What does it mean to represent violence in this way? And such a tragic event. I had a lot of doubts around whether it was ethical to even do so.  But that idea of why we were told these stories when we were children, what was the information that was being passed to us that might serve us later in our lives and the lives of our kids? And so I think it's made me think more generationally about the work that I make. Trauma is not necessarily just this negative thing; it's a gift that we've been given that can influence and keep us safe in situations we might not expect to experience. The last thing I'll say is that the mix of the experience of witnessing what I witnessed, and then having a child a few years after, has made me think very deeply about what it means to create an archive, what it means to document because this film that I made is now a part of a finite collection of images that will ever be made from this way of life that existed on that land. Because it's never going to happen again, and we don't have access to that place anymore. So there's this quality to the archive that is a form of resistance, a pushback against erasure, and to step into the role of an archivist or a filmmaker or a documentarian or a storyteller, I hold a lot of responsibility in that. That feels like a vocation, like a calling, like a way to resist the erasure of my culture.

Artists often follow rules and constraints that can offer unique and interesting results. Did you make and follow any rules prior to filming that you stuck with throughout this process?

I don't think there's something that I stuck with through the entire process, A to Z.  During the first year of filming this film, I brought a DP with me because I was feeling very unsure of my own capability to be the person creating images. I quickly found that it had to be me holding the camera to be in relationship to these women in a really particular way, and just blend into the scenery the way that I wanted to, so I could capture something of a more observational nature. What I found in doing that is that a lot of my decisions as a director were made as a cinematographer. It just became this really organic process where what I was seeing and then what the camera was recording was an extension of the way that I saw these four women. I felt a lot of power in that. There was this organic creation of images and a story that mirrored an internal state of mind. The way that I saw them was somehow organically coming out through the images I was creating. That became a rule or a guiding light as a director holding a camera shaped a lot of the language of the film, the relational aspects of it, and the pacing and style.

What have you learned as a filmmaker, specifically in filmmaking, from this experience that you'll carry into future projects?

Oh, man, I mean, I think like the biggest things I've learned are to reject all the things that everyone tells you. All the ways you're supposed to do it. It's incredible to make a first feature and step back and learn things about yourself as an artist, and I think a lot of what I've learned is that for me, images hold power. Relationships are everything. Documentary film is a genre and type of cinema that's based on a relationship to the real world and the representation of reality, and that's so rich. If you're not entering into that thinking about relationships, then something is missing. So for me, that's been a really big piece. The political nature of the stories that we tell. The personal is really political. Part of it is because I think living through something like a conflict or a war, you have that really acute sense that you're living through history, and politics are happening around you. Hold this camera as a microscope for any person or event. It lifts it up, and it gives it importance, and what you choose to make images of is a personal political choice. Using that narrative power for our human history to edge towards justice. Not that I'm saying like, Oh, I want to make social justice films. I don't think that's it. There is a really unique ability that cinema, and especially nonfiction cinema, has to force us to reflect on the nature of reality and imagine into the future. All of those things have been big lessons for me, and I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to make this work, reflect on it, and share it with a larger community like my community. Just continue to be humbled by the learning.

Lastly, what's next for you? Are you working on anything else that we should keep an eye out for?

Oh, boy. Yeah, I'm working on like a handful of things. I mean, the main thing related to this is that my next project is actually a creation of an archive from Artsakh but based on an archive created from the point of view of the body that is trying to document embodied memory, which makes sense given our whole conversation.  I'm also working on a media arts anthology called Portals, which is bringing together a group of artists who are all from the SWANA region and mothers or primary caregivers to build out like a speculative fiction world and make multimedia art from it as a way to prioritize the stories of caregivers in speculative work and imagine new futures that are based on care in relationships. That one got a Creative Capital Award last year, and we're about to put together the cohort of artists, and I could not be more excited about that. Some other little things, but those are the two main ones.

Emily, thank you so much for speaking with me today, and I just want to say that it's really rare that you get the opportunity to speak with a filmmaker who has created something that's hit you hard. I watched this film and was moved so deeply, and then the next day, I was given the opportunity to interview you, so I could thank you directly.  You've made something that is so much bigger than all of its parts, and I hope that it makes its way into mainstream streaming services and even into universities because it really is a masterful, historic, and cathartic piece of work that deserves so much recognition. Thank you so much for this.

I'm so grateful to you, Rachael. Thanks for those really kind words for watching the film, and it was an absolute pleasure. These were wonderful questions and a great conversation.

Read our review of There Was, There Was Not