San Francisco International Film Festival 20 April - 04 May 2006

• Skip to Main Content
• Home
• Gallery
• Films

• Our History
• Great Moments
• Awards & Tributes

• Collective Memory
• Closeups
• Guests

 

Between a nondescript Canadian apartment and the sunny hillsides of Armenia, Atom Egoyan (The Adjuster, Speaking Parts) crafts a story of estrangement—personal, cultural and ancestral —in an age of mobility and global communication. The director casts himself in the role of a Canadian-Armenian photographer who, accompanied by his Armenian wife and a local guide, embarks on an assignment to shoot 12 holy sites in their homeland for a calendar. As the wife becomes increasingly steeped in the culture and past of her ancestors, her husband continues to think of his history as merely "interesting stories.” “Don’t you feel the need to come closer? To actually touch and feel?” the guide asks, but the photographer remains isolated behind the camera by his inability to speak his native tongue and by his confusion about the increasing sympathies between his wife and the guide. The reasons for the man’s returning to Canada by himself reveal themselves slowly, over the year marked by the calendar he photographed, through flashbacks, the blue toned images of the couple’s video journal and through the letters he composes as he tries to come to terms with the rift in their relationship. Arsinée Khanjian and Ashot Adamian, as the wife and the guide, give wonderfully warm, natural performances and Egoyan is appropriately uptight as the peevish pragmatist. His isolation and loss are underlined by the surprisingly lyrical images that capture the landscape and faces of Armenia, including an unforgettable sea of sheep.

—Rachel Rosen

Copyright © 2006 San Francisco Film Society