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ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
Knowing arrest was imminent, a young woman contemplates suicide in order to escape a more terrible fate in prison. Unable to slash her wrists or locate poison, she resolves to throw herself in front of a moving streetcar, but abandons the idea, realizing they would only arrest the innocent driver for her death…A border guard recalls the chilling image of an executioner who perfunctorily washed the blood of his tortured victims from his boots…A WWII veteran is arrested in 1947 under criminal code 58 B as a traitor to his country. The crime? He was a POW Imprisoned at Auschwitz by the Nazis…An old man speaks from his bed. Crippled while doing time in the labor camps, his feet have not touched the ground in 45 years. In his hand, he holds a cracked mirror. “This mirror”, he says, “ is my window to the world. It is a twisted, shattered mirror, and my world appears shattered…”
These are a few of the haunting memories recounted by survivors in Zareh Tjeknavorian’s Enemy of the People, a documentary film which explores the human impact of Stalin’s repression in the former Soviet Republic of Armenia. The smallest of the republics, Armenia was a microcosm of the tragic events that swept the USSR between the 1930’s and Stalin’s death in 1953. After a lifetime of silence, Armenians openly explore the repression through over 200 interviews shot throughout Armenia and Russia over a period of three years by director/producer Zareh Tjeknavorian.
The documentary’s extraordinary stories are woven together by writer/performer Eric Bogosian’s powerful narration. Enemy of the People also features a wealth of rare archival footage extensively researched and selected in Moscow and Yerevan. Recently, National Geographic Magazine recommended Enemy of the People as one of three essential films about the Armenians, along with Atom Egoyan’s Ararat and Sergei Paradjanov’s The Color of Pomegranates.
Enemy of the People has been broadcast on KCET in Los Angeles and WGBH in Boston, as well as several times nationally in Armenia, to great critical and popular acclaim. “…It will be naïve to think that the film was produced only to show the past. Yesterday’s tragedies give birth to new ones today, and Enemy of the People is aimed at preventing, or at least decreasing, the danger of this,” wrote AZG, the top selling Armenian daily. “Today ignorance is a tragedy in itself. The film begins with the filmmakers asking ordinary people on the street the questions, “What do you know about Stalin?” and “What is Stalinism?” The answers are short and awkward: “ I do not remember”, “He was a good man”, “He came and went, there is no reason to talk about him now.”
“For most Armenians, the truth about the Stalin years, concealed behind misinformation for generations, has been like an elephant in the living room – a tragedy that still lives with them but which everyone pretends not to see…” says Tjeknavorian. “My purpose in making this film was to make everyone, and Armenians in particular, aware of the personal impact of Stalinism. Enemy of the People focuses on daily life during the Terror through the eyes of everyday men and women who survived the era. Through them I have attempted to challenge the systematic denial of the past and to preserve for the future the human faces behind the cold facts of history.”
Many of the people in the film have already passed away. The nightmarish absurdity of the Stalin era lives in their stories, in their expressions, and in their reflections. To quote Mamikon Vardanian, one of the individuals who has died since the completion of the film, “Why does death not know its time and place? Why should I die so young, while that tyrant Stalin lives? I swore that until that tyrant died, I would stay alive.”
A graduate of New York University’s prestigious film school, Tjeknavorian had been living in Armenia for several years when Armenian General Benevolent Union President, Louise Manoogian Simone, suggested the idea of a documentary about the Stalin repression in Armenia. For Tjeknavorian, the sudden realization of the vast number of people whose lives were transformed by the repression was overwhelming. “During the early/mid-nineties when Armenia was suffering a disastrous energy blockade, due to the war with Azerbaijan, Stalin was just about the last thing on most people’s minds, -- I never thought twice about it. As soon as I started my research, I was struck by the awareness that if you randomly stop and speak with people on the street, chances are you’d find that they had spent 20 years dong hard labor in Siberia, and you look at this sweet little old lady or man and ask yourself, ‘How? Why?”
Enemy of the People is a presentation of the Armenian General Benevolent Union. To purchase a copy please visit their website at www.agbu.com.
Enemy of the People. 58 minutes. 1998. Produced and Directed by Zareh Tjeknavorian/Associate Producer Hovik Hoveyan/ Editor Zelda Greenstein/Narrated by Eric Bogosian/Music by Alessandro Riciarelli, John Tavener, Ash Ra Tempel/Sound Design Juan Carlos Martinez |