“This film is important to me because it describes how I lost a quarter of my family”
Photographer Alexandra Avakian, National Geographic Magazine March 2004
“It is a brilliant work, profoundly sad and very important.”
James Russell
Professor of Armenian Studies
Harvard University
“Joseph Stalin’s decades-long reign of terror in the former Soviet Union is, almost incredibly after half a century, still being documented and, worse yet, still being felt. In his acclaimed film, Enemy of the People, narrated by Eric Bogosian, filmmaker Zareh Tjeknavorian … extracted shocking truths and bitter memories about the horrors, all the more painful for having been repressed for so many years.”
KCET magazine, October 10, 1999
“This experience, which Zareh’s film so effectively shows, is now being put behind the people of Armenia, but it is still so indelible, it’s written on their faces, in their hearts and souls. It’s not so easy to get rid of.”
Dr. Ronald Suny,
Professor of Political Science,
University of Chicago
“…It is sad and painful to watch those old faces, shriveled with loss…People passed through trials that truly make one wonder how they survived…So, what do these grandparents remember? How the secret police came at night and took those close to them, how their neighbors, brothers, fathers, and children betrayed them, how fear eroded their mind, will, and conscience…
[In the conclusion of the film] destinies are piled up in layers. Every interviewee speaks for a minute or two, and many for merely seconds. It is a collective portrait of a people sacrificed for a bloody idea, presented here as a mosaic. Each part encapsulates the entire picture. There are no soloists here, but a terrible chorus. The tragic recitative grows with every frame, climaxing in a kaleidoscope of faces...
…The “Enemy of the People” is, of course, Stalin. A phrase created by a dictator to destroy the lives of millions returns to him here as a historical boomerang.”
From Boomerang for a Dictator by Oleg Sulkin. Published in Novoye Russkoye Slovo, top selling Russian daily. New York, March 16, 1999