Girl from Moush

At the age of 23, without ever having been there herself, Canadian filmmaker Gariné Torossian makes use of myths, oral traditions and illustrated books to imagine her spiritual home of Armenia, the land of her parents. She impressively deconstructs images of remote village churches, farmers working the land or Mount Ararat, Armenia’s national symbol, in order to reassemble them in an experimental cubist collage and interweave them with the textures of Super 8 and 16mm film and the sounds of traditional folk songs. A sensitive cinematographic mixture of cultural icons of both historical and timeless significance. Inspired by the film Sayat Nova by the great Armenian director Sergei Parajanov, whose face can be detected in many of this film’s dissolves, Torossian creates a sensuously surreal realm of images about a sense of diaspora and of longing for one’s cultural roots. (Berlinale)