05/08/2023
This Saturday, DokuFest's audience saw the film “Landshaft” which in the International Feature Dox Category. It is a documentary directed and produced by Daniel Kötter. Kötter’s practices revolve around working closely with communities to extract stories and underlying conflicts.
His cinematic journey has led him to explore Africa, the Middle East, North America, and Southeast Asia, and today we watched what he developed during his time in Armenia.
Landshaft explores the consequences and the ongoing conflicts in Armenia. It presents a story of contemplation on a border where few people live but which has become a threshold of war, occupied by Azerbaijan since the Karabakh War in 2020.
The residents in this area are some of the few who have decided to stay and live in the area. As on of the protagonists says, it is easy to leave, but if you stay, you have to be super committed to the land.
The story unfolds with the local and the day-to-day perspectives of the people who live near the border to grasp the psycho-geography and the geopolitical layers which surround building the conflict in this area of eastern Armenia.
The documentary starts with views from the lake that define one of the borders while the other sides are covered by mountains. The director chose this to structure the narration and better confine the multilayered narratives of history, belonging, and territoriality.
Discussions surrounding belonging to mountains, belonging to the land, and the quest for peace determine the endless possibilities for developing a prosperous future. In this barren area where nature overpowers everything, people still find a way to relive their lives with routines: driving, grazing the cattle, fulfilling daily chores at home, and chatting about every day things.
Two people drive and discuss how politics and war have forever changed how people perceive the landscape.
It is not just a question of mountains, but who the mountains belong to. It is not only their land but our land too. At the end of the documentary, there is a startled voice which wants a secure answer to whom the land, mountains, and lake belong. This question is extremely difficult to answer and is heavily influenced by what will happen in the future.
As days go by, the fields remain the same along with the aftermaths of war and occupation, while technology and drones become faceless entities of terror.
The documentary delves into the ways people try to uphold their identity while highlighting the fear of always having acute reactions to situations that they have no control of.
After the screening, there was a Q&A in which the producer and director shared how they shot the documentary and how they developed the narration. They said “they always try to find the right approach with the communities and locals on how to tell their story, although I already started with a good research space (the director explained beforehand he was invited to be part of a research team in Armenia to work on this topic he unfolds in the documentary), and after the war, there were these optics of the locals of a war being won by the drones, moreover, of being seen without being seen.”
You can find more documentaries and films in the International Feature Dox category on our website and delve into stories from around the world.
By: Blerina Kanxha
Photo: Agon Dana
