Mariya SAAKIAN
Мария СААКЯН
Maria SAAKIAN
Armenia / Russia / Denmark / Germany, 2012, 96mn 
Colour, fiction
Alaverdi
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Алаверди

 

 I’m Going to Change My Name

 Alaverdi

Other titles : Это не я
 
Directed by : Mariya SAAKIAN (Мария СААКЯН)
Writing credits : Mariya SAAKIAN (Мария СААКЯН)
 
Cast
Yevgeni TSYGANOV (Евгений ЦЫГАНОВ) ...Piotr
Arina ADJU (Арина АДЖУ) ...Evridika
Mariya ATLAS-POPOVA (Мария АТЛАС-ПОПОВА) ...Sona
 
Cinematography : Mko MALKHASYAN (Мко МАЛХАСЯН)
Companies : Anniko Films
 
Site : yerevan.ru/2011/02/03/maria-sahakyan-alaverdi/

Plot synopsis
Based on the Armenian ‘Sharakan’, a nine-part song that brings us gradually closer to meaning, Maria Saakyan’s new film further develops the poetic invention apparent in her first feature, The Lighthouse. Focusing on the world of a 14-year-old girl, Evridika, who is experiencing the first extremes of adolescent emotion, it makes effective and imaginative use of her private world centred on internet chat rooms and mobile phone recordings. The film’s originality lies in a dream world of images and poetry (Rilke’s poems to Orpheus and Eurydice, and Saakyan’s own), in which the Armenian landscape also plays its role. Her mother’s former lover returns, giving rise to unforeseen consequences and parallels. Her film, says Saakyan, is designed to reflect the different dimensions of love. While this is a highly personal work, one can find influences as various as Tarkovsky and Maya Deren.
Peter Hames, BFI London
 

commentaries
Maria Saakyan: I’m Going to Change my Name (Eto ne ia, 2012), Joe ANDREW, kinokultura.com, 2013
 
Director statement
This is a film about the feelings of a 14-year-old girl. Even maybe not a film in traditional terms, but a kind of poem or song, words and images that her mind is full of. The main heroes of this poem are Body and Soul, Music and Chaos, Girl and Mother and also Love and Desire as 14-year-old Evridika understands it. This story starts with my own feeling of being lost. One day, I realised that I didn’t even feel alive anymore. And so I did the only thing that teenagers habitually do when they feel like this – I tried to hurt myself. I invented a story, a story out of my fears and pain, and it was like in the famous song ‘Hurt’ by Johnny Cash: ‘I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel, I focus on the pain, the only thing that’s real.’ From this moment the story of Evridika – a girl, who is living but who isn’t alive yet – begins. Day by day the story got more detailed and I found out that Evridika’s main problem was her mother and her unknown father. Evridika suffered from a lack of parental love. Evridika’s uncertainty in herself and her greatest wish – to be loved – all stemmed from this hole in her life. I found out what is happening with Evridika – she cannot trust anyone. That is why Evridika is afraid to love and has grown accustomed to finding answers to her most important questions on the internet and, surrounded by a multitude of falsehoods, she locks herself away in the world of her imagination/art. Accordingly, into Evridika’s path comes a man – Pyotr – who is, in fact, but unknown to her, her father. So, here starts her escape. I think that this is how Evridika herself would explain it: ’I was in a room where a woman was strangling her newborn child. I live in a world where cruelty is ever-present. I think that I was unwanted both by my father and mother. I am in so much pain that I cry out, but no one hears me. This is my song. And somehow now I am allowed to descend into Hell. As Orpheus sang after Eurydice’s death – and his song was so sad – he said he was allowed to descend into the Kingdom of the Dead. In the Kingdom of the Dead are the roots of all things. That is where my own roots lie. That is where I saw the Love that had once become the reason for my existence and I was reborn. I will love others not because that will make me less lonely, but because it is the only possible way of existing.
Maria Saakyan

Selected in the following festivals or events :
- Yerevan International Film Festival "Golden Apricot", Yerevan (Armenia), 2013
- The Times BFI London Film Festival, London (United Kingdom), 2012