My Sweet Land and the Usefulness of Dreams

My Sweet Land by Sareen Hairabedian was one of the stronger film in an already mostly strong feature documentary competition at the 2024 Amman International Film Festival. The film was completed in 2023 after a one-and-a-half year long editing process together with editor Raphaëlle Martin-Hölger. When asked about it, the director-cinematographer Hairabedian described the process as “delicate”.

Those who see the film will realise soon where this delicacy comes from. My Sweet Land weaves together in finely tuned and empathic cinema-vérité style those big and personal stories that history is made of. Those ambitions are easy to fail, but the film doesn’t. It finds quite unwittingly the suitable tone, rhythm and emphasis that makes the material work. This is helped greatly by the young protagonist. An eleven-year-old, slightly stoic but very recognizable boy with the name Vrej, and a very special trait: his consistent dream of becoming a dentist later in live.

Through the eyes of Vrej aged 13 later in the film, the director paints a nation and its people: the Armenian, recently disappeared enclave Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, during the years 2019-2022, in a growing state of despair and militant resistance, threatened under the military pressure of his bigger and more powerful neighbour Azerbaijan.

Apart from the director’s skills, the editor and the producer, sometimes also the sound operator Azza Hourani, there are three things that helped strongly to created the cinematic feat of My Sweet Land. One is the director’s engagement; the second is the choice made during the shooting process to concentrate on the boy Vrej instead of following several children amidst this war; and the third is history itself. History is that bigger force, deciding that Russia had to invade Ukraine, eroding its peacekeeping role between Artsakh and Azerbaijan. This made the nation with its remaining 100,000 remaining inhabitants of Armenian descent prey to regional power politics. This is what we know and can reconstruct, but it is not what we see in My Sweet Land.

As the title says, what we see on screen is the director’s subtle commitment; she herself is of Armenian descent and speaks Armenian. Her great-grandparents escaped the genocide and found refuge in the Middle East. She describes growing up with the story of the Artsakh saying: “I think this connection created a natural bond, which allowed for this film to come to life”. That may be, but we can only look into that part of her soul reflected in the film; and there we see her clever and passionate dedication to make the narrative work as it does.  

Then there is the protagonist Vrej and his friends. A kid, and kids, like any others. Only that he talks sometimes, eleven years old, and two years later with a tumultuous flight to the Armenian homeland and a difficult return through the mountains and past Russian sentries back to Artsakh. Happily, their house – unlike others – stands undamaged. We see him and his playmates in their different habitats, as there are family, parents, other relatives; they are at school, in an orthodox church, in the village and outdoors. There are military instructors teaching the kids how to march, how to handle and hold their guns, and how to recognize places where landmines are. And all of these moments breathe the spirit of a nation under threat.

Sometimes very explicit, as the convent’s schoolmistress explains the spirit of the country, sometimes as a casual matter, as the grandmother reflects on the ever-lasting wars, or as the grandfather sits in his comfy chair with his combat fatigue trousers. In-between there is peace, there are vineyards, bees and beekeepers. There is tea with grandmother, there are boys playing, strolling through the streets and the countryside.

My Sweet Land does many things, and it does them in a cinematic, empathic and fascinating way that at the same time informs us about the mindset of a small nation at the point of being swallowed up by history.

But maybe one thing stands out above all: the usefulness of dreams, especially in desperate and dire situations. Vrej’s dream supersedes war and touches the viewer with its hope.

Ronald Glasbergen
Edited by Birgit Beumers
© FIPRESCI 2024