Zara Jian’s new film may be a homage to the great Armenian filmmaker, Sergei Paradjanov, but it’s not a conventional documentary (or even a typical drama-documentary for that matter). “I will revenge this world with Love” S. Paradjanov (screening in Venice Classics) has a deliberately fluid, free flowing, genre-blurring structure.
“This film is not a classic biopic dedicated to Paradjanov,” Jian insists. “The film is based on real events in my life. The film is a form of, let’s say, therapy for me through the drama in Paradjanov’s journey. This is my way of making the movie…”
Paradjanov (1924-1990) was the Georgian-born Armenian genius who studied at film school in Moscow under Dovzhenko and who became celebrated worldwide for poetic masterpieces like The Colour of Pomegranates (1969) and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965). No-one else in the Soviet bloc made films quite like him. He was a rebellious and fearless spirit who frequently found himself at odds with the authorities and spent many years in prison. He was also bisexual. This, as much as his dissident politics, seemed to rile the Soviet authorities.
“He was a free man in a country that wasn’t free. That what was made me feel close to him. I feel like a person without borders,” the director states.
As a child, Jian used to visit the Paradjanov museum in Yerevan and loved spending time in the garden there. “I remember our teacher brought us to this museum. I wasn’t [then] very into his work but I remember I was inspired to find some trash and make beautiful things with this trash – just as Paradjanov used to do!”
The filmmaker had left her homeland as a young woman, studying and working first in Russia, then in LA, where she came under the influence of acting coach Ivana Chubbuck, before returning to Eastern Europe.
She had studied economics and TV show management and is a businesswoman as well as an artist.
Jian credits Chubbuck with tipping her off about a special screening of The Colour of Pomegranates in LA. She then “went deep into his biography.”
However, her approach to I Will Revenge This World With Love was strongly influenced by her experiences during the war in Armenia in 2020 when the country was bombed by Azerbaijan and Turkey. She had been living in Russia, feeling increasingly frustrated that no-one seemed to be paying attention to the Armenian suffering.
“My life changed again. I came back to Armenia. I was helping, rescuing children, organising art therapy…”
The director even took some lessons from the military, learning how to shoot. She was appalled by the violence she had witnessed. Angry and vengeful, she says she felt at times like “going to the border and just killing.”
Friends warned her that, with such an attitude, she would destroy herself.
Paradjanov and his philosophy helped “save” her. Her aggression dissipated and she began to think instead of “making revenge with love…I am on that path.”
In the autumn of 2022, Jian was visiting the Paradjanov Museum in Yerevan. She talks about spending 25 minutes in front of Paradjanov’s self-portraits in a near trance. This was the moment she began thinking in earnest about her film.
“I was curious that if Paradjanov was [still] alive today, what he would feel about this mess…”
What impressed her was her subject’s inner freedom. Paradjanov was living and working in very repressive circumstances and yet remained unbowed and never succumbed to bitterness or nihilism.
“Even in jail, he was doing these collages, these paintings with whatever he could find,” Jian describes how, with his nails, he used to scratch shapes into milk bottle tops or do portraits of his fellow prisoners with a pen.
The film features multiple interviews including an archival one she found with Paradjanov himself.
An impressive array of Paradjanov’s admirers, colleagues and friends feature in the doc, among them Atom Egoyan, Emir Kusturica, Tarsem Singh, Chulpan Khamatova and Artavazd Peleshyan. Jian wanted international as well as Armenian voices to be heard, figures who had faced and overcome conflict and oppression in the same way that Paradjanov once had, using art and culture as their tools.
“All these amazing heroes came together and joined us in a way I find hard to describe even…”
It’s a measure of Paradjanov’s continuing influence that Tarsem Singh’s video for Lady Gaga’s song ‘911’ was directly influenced by The Colour of Pomegranates.
Jian isn’t just the director of the new film. She also wrote and produced. She remembers completing the script in a white hot blaze of creativity.
“I am not a scriptwriter at all…but in this case, I just woke up, it was almost 2am, and I came to the computer and started typing and typing.” By 4am, the script was completed.
“I will revenge this world with Love” S. Paradjanov was made as a co-production with France, and there was also UK involvement through executive producer David Kelly (who first encountered the project at the Golden Apricot Festival in Armenia last year). The project had support from the CNC in France and the National Cinema Centre of Armenia. The French co-producer is Stéphane Jourdain of La Huit Production.
The film was completed in only nine months. The aim now is to show it as widely as possible. It has a chance of being chosen as Armenia’s Oscar contender and an international sales agent is expected to be announced shortly.
