Amman 2024 Review: MY SWEET LAND, And The Usefulness Of Having Dreams

Sareen Hairabedian’s impressive documentary wins on all fronts.

My Sweet Land of Sareen Hairabedian was one of the stronger films in a small but mostly strong feature documentary competition section of the 2024 Amman International Film Festival. The film gained not only the International Film Critics Fipresci Award but was also honoured with Jury and Audience Awards.

The movie was finished in 2023 after a six years smeared out production process, including a one and half year long editing process together with editor Raphaëlle Martin-Hölger. When asked about it, director – cinematographer Hairabedian decribed the process as ‘delicate’. My Sweet Land weaves in finely tuned and empathic cinéma vérité style, those big and personal stories together that history is made of.

Ambitious and easy to fail, but it doesn’t. It finds in a seemingly loose manner the tone, rhythm and emphasis that makes the material work. And the material is being helped greatly by its young protagonist. He is an eleven-year-old at the beginning of the film, a bit stoic but very recognizable boy with the name Vrej. A boy that has one very special trait: his consistent dream of becoming a dentist later in live.

Through the eyes of Vrej, the director paints the nation Artsakh and its people. A nation also known as the enclave Nagorno Karabach that has now disappeared. But during the years 2019 – 2022, when the film was made, it was still fighting for its survival and amidst this we see Vrej and his family, while the director uses this viewpoint to immerse the viewer in the growing mixture of despair and militant nationalistic resistance that overcomes the inhabitants as they are threatened to lose all their possessions to their powerful neighbour Azerbaijan.

Apart of the skills of the director, her editor and her producer, sometimes sound operator Azza Hourani there are three things that helped strongly to created the cinematic feat that My Sweet Land is. One is the close involvement of the director. The second is the choice made during the process of filming to concentrate on the boy Vrej instead of following several children amidst this war, the third is again history itself. The latter as a bigger god deciding that Russia had to invade Ukraine, eroding its peacekeeping role between Artsakh and Azerbaijan. This making the nation with its remaining one hundred thousand remaining inhabitants of Armenian descent a prey of 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 is the subtle commitment of the director who herself is from Armenian descent and speaks Armenian. Her great grandparents escaped from the genocide and found refuge in the Middle East. She describes growing up with the story of Artsakh saying: ‘I think this connection created a natural bond which allowed for this film to come to life’. That could be, but we can only look into that part of her soul that is reflected in the film. And there we see her clever and passionate dedication to make the narrative work as it does. 

And then there is the protagonist Vrej and his friends. A kid and kids as other kids. Only 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 – other than some others – still stands undamaged. We see him and his playmates in all their different habitats as there are family, parents, other relatives, at school, in eastern orthodox church, the village and the great 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 breath the spirit of a nation under threat.

Sometimes very explicit, as the schoolmistress of priests explains the spirit of the country, sometimes as a casual matter of fact, as his grandmother reflects on the forever wars or as his grandfather sits in his easy chair with his combat fatigue trousers on. And in between there is peace, there are vineyards, bees and beekeepers. There is tea with grandmother, boys playing, strolling through streets and countryside.

Vrej’s dream supersedes war and touches the viewer with personal kind of hope. So 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 sticks out above all:  the usefulness of having dreams. Especially in dire situations.