It’s an area of bleak, windswept majesty. The border area between Armenia and Azerbaijan has rolling mountains and long, dry plains. It has been the site of constant skirmishes including a 44-day war in 2020.
Screening in the Burning Lights Competition in at VdR, Daniel Kötter’s Landshaft (sold by Syndicado) is set in this bitterly contested area, much of it (including the Sotk gold mine) now controlled by Azerbaijan. This is one of several projects by the German artist and filmmaker that have dealt with what he calls ‘political geography.’
“I got an invitation for a research residency in Armenia and so I started looking at different landscapes to focus on in Armenia,” Kötter explains what first brought him to the border land. Once he arrived there, engaging with the local people and assessing the landscape, he soon decided to make a film.
This is not an easy or welcoming place to live. When the wind comes up, it can get very cold. The political tension is obvious. “Whoever has the chance leaves,” one local resident comments.
“I was travelling around Armenia a lot to look at different places and I have to say that, in a touristic sense, I have seen much more beautiful landscapes than the one you can see in the film, but,even when I arrived for the first time with my close collaborator, Sona Karapoghosyan, in that area, there was something which was hard to analyse…we [felt] immediately attached and attracted to that kind of landscape, the emptiness, this high plateau which is very cold and empty,” the director reflects.
This used to be the “connecting road” to Nagorno-Karabakh but now, because of the war, it has become a dead-end.
In the beginning, Kötter’s intention was to “make a film from both sides” and also to go to Azerbaijan to meet the people there. In the end, he decided against this.
“It’s more important sometimes for my films – what is not filmed and is not seen,” the director explains why Landshaftmakes few explicit references to the conflict. In the course of filming, he didn’t see a single person from Azerbaijan. The film’s subjects have vivid stories about the “Turks,” as the Azerbaijanis are called. They are former neighbours now turned enemies.
The conversations heard on the soundtrack were recorded separately to the imagery. “One of the main, most important techniques I use when I film in countries whose language I don’t speak is that I don’t do classical interviews but I try to build up a network of people from the country that I can bring together for everyday conversations,” Kötter explains his technique. He collected around 50 hours of conversation material to draw on.
The Azerbaijanis have been controlling and winning the war through the use of Turkish-constructed drones. The Armenians live in a continuing state of fear. Last September, when Kötter was editing his documentary, there were again bombings in precisely the areas in which he had been filming.
The director began making Landshaft not long after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He tried hard to avoid the Russian army. Unlike the Armenians, though, he was in the “privileged” position that he could get out of the country. “I knew that whenever the bombing would start or another conflict situation would come up there, I could just leave for Yerevan and take the next flight.”
We see gravestones dotted on the plains. They are from abandoned former Azerbaijani cemeteries. Up until 1988, the area was lived in by the Azerbaijanis but they were then forced to leave to make wayor Armenians from Baku who re-settled there.
Toward the end of Landshaft, Kötter also includes an extraordinary shot filmed at eye level from inside the middle of a huge flock of sheep. “By the sheer length, it takes on an allegoric dimension I suppose,” the director says of the sequence which involved him running with the sheep. “I do camera myself. I never learned how to do camera properly but when I am filming, I could not delegate the camera to someone else because that is really the process where the image comes about. I cannot have other people decide on that because I know what I want to see.”
Kötter describes Landshaft as being “fuelled” by two of his earlier series of projects. One is Landscapes and Bodies, his two 360-degree documentaries designed to be watched on VR glasses and which looked at the impact of mining on communities. The other is a trilogy dealing with urbanisation in Tehran, Cairo and Addis Ababa.
“This Armenia project started off as something that would be more strongly related to mining but then, when I came across this very particular situation where a mine, by the war, is divided into two halves, and what that means for the people living there, it became bigger,” Kötter reflects on how Landshaft evolved. “It became more what I would call this psychogeography of people living close to a mine, living close to a border and having experienced the war, expulsion and migration…I felt that if I just focused on the mine, I would not get the point of this landscape.”
Landshaft is now beginning its festival journey. Kötter is planning to screen it for the community in Armenia…and is contemplating making another project in the region.
In his work, Kötter’s approach is deliberately oblique. He doesn’t shoot the obvious. Landshaft deals with the consequences of violence and war – but none of the upheaval is shown directly on screen.
“What I’m often interested in, the actual core of what the film might be about, doesn’t have a visual representation,” the director explains. “To give you another example, on [a] film I made about urbanisation process (Addis Ababa), I purely filmed in the periphery which shows the consequences of an urbanisation process in the centre. You don’t see a single image from the centre…here, in a similar way, I had very spectacular drone footage from the gold mine itself but I decided not to use it.”
Kötter’s work is often about “absence.” When it comes to depicting war, he shows the “there is always the other side…there is normality, there is boredom, there is calmness that is actually infused or charged with the violence, the memory of the violence and the anticipation of the violence.”
The director adds: “probably as a filmmaker, my nerves are not strong enough to become a war photographer!”
