When Marco De Stefanis was invited to a workshop at Watch Docs in Poland a decade ago, he little realised that this would mark the beginning of a documentary project that would take a decade to complete. It was there he first met his producer and “partner in crime,” Ofelya Zalyan, who is a human rights lawyer in Armenia.
Zalyan told him about political prisoners who had been under arrest since 2013, among them Shant, a prominent Armenian activist and dissident. De Stefanis was startled. He had never heard of political prisoners in Armenia.
In April 2016, the director visited the country and spoke to the families of these political prisoners. That’s how he came across Shant’s teenage son, Shahen Harutyunya, the protagonist of De Stefanis’ new documentary The Winning Generation.
Both father and son were charismatic and idealistic, ready to endure beatings and prison in the name of political freedom for Armenia – and determined to stop Putin’s Russia from pulling the strings in their country.
“The moment I got interested in Shahen was when I realised the pressure this young guy was under,” De Stefanis recalls. “He was keeping up the fight while his father was in prison. I felt really sorry for a guy that age that doesn’t have the same youth I had.”
On the first evening the director was in Armenia, he saw Shahen tussling with the police. Afterwards, he went to a restaurant with the young activist and his mother. They had no sooner finished their meal than the police took Shahen away.
Many of Shahen’s contemporaries have left Armenia to look for a new life elsewhere but he has stayed there, whatever the dangers he has faced.
From 2016 to 2019, the financing for the documentary remained sketchy and piecemeal. De Stefanis had won a bursary from Future Docs, and various NGO’s supported the documentary. At times, the filmmakers themselves put in some money.
After the 2020 Armenian war broke out, BIND in the Netherlands and EiE Film in Italy came on board.
During the making of the film, De Stefanis became close to his subject. At times, Shahen, whose father was still in prison, seemed to regard him as a replacement father figure. Shahen’s own parents were very keen for him to participate in the documentary. They felt that “a camera would protect him more from the police violence” and that the authorities would be wary about targeting someone being followed by a foreign film crew.
Even so, the filmmakers had to take precautions. They released very little information about the project. The director talks of meeting the head of the Armenian Film Institute while pitching the documentary at When East Meets West in Trieste in 2023 and discovering the executive knew nothing about the project (even though it had been shooting by then for seven years).
As a youngster, Shahen had dreamed of becoming a professional footballer. That ambition was shattered because of an injury caused by polio but, as the film shows, he did have an unlikely moment in the spotlight. During the 2016 World Cup qualifier between Armenia and Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal, he ran on the field to protest against his father’s imprisonment.
Shahen is now in his 20s and is one of the rising young talents in Armenian politics. He is chairman of the nationalist Shant alliance party and tipped for high office.
Making the film has given De Stefanis (who is Italian but has been based in the Netherlands since 2001) insights into the Armenian psyche and in particular the enduring trauma from the genocide during the First World War, a catastrophe that has never been fully acknowledged.
“It’s a country that always feels it has to be defending itself and to keep alive the memories [of the genocide]. If they forgot about it, no-one else would remember…it is still an open wound,” the director says.
The Winning Generation world-premiered at Movies That Matter 2026. A version of this article was originally published for SEE NL, a collaboration between EYE Filmmuseum and the Netherlands Film Fund.
