Stepanyan’s ‘Village of Women’ Depicts the Beauty and the Melancholy of Life in an Armenian Village

She said that while she had done camera work alone before, it was more difficult here in a village house, with no bath and sleeping in the children’s room. But this also opened the way to establishing intimacy and becoming a part of the family. She did not want to film them only as subjects. Stepanyan said, “I wanted to become a part of them and do it in that way. I think I was able to convey that intimate feeling.”

She came and went over the year, each time usually staying two weeks in Lichk. She captured the various aspects of village life in each season. In addition to the changes in nature and work that it necessitates, the human landscape also went through cycles of change: the men would come back from Russia in the winter for several months.

Stepanyan said, “At once, the women changed, and they became more female. And the atmosphere between the couples, there was embarrassment. They were married for 10 years, but they were not used to each other. They needed time before becoming comfortable, but by then the men would leave again.”

Finances

At first there was no financing for her documentary, but eventually she obtained it in France and Armenia. So, in the spring, she told her producer she wanted to take a team with her, a cameraman and sound man. By this time, the villagers knew her well. She had already filmed three seasons and warned them that the next time she came it might be with two more people.

They were both men, and Stepanyan said she was afraid the villagers would be uncomfortable, but it was not true. The two specialists were able to do technical things that Stepanyan alone could not accomplish. At the same time, she did see that their presence made the villagers more constrained and she did not use as much material from the spring as from other seasons.

The film ended up coproduced by two French companies, the medium-sized La Huit Production and TV78, a television channel company (https://www.tv78.com/), along with Hayk Documentary Studio (https://haykdfs.com/en/), which is the oldest documentary studio in Armenia (it used to make all the television documentary films in the Soviet period). La Huit was the main producer and began to provide Stepanyan’s travel expenses and a per diem before full funding was obtained. “Village of Women” is considered a small budget film.

Music was also recorded in Armenia for the film. Stepanyan worked with Cynthia Zaven, an Armenian-Lebanese composer who composed music for Stepanyan’s prior films too. The editing and other work however were completed in France.

Stepanyan said that she began each of her three documentaries in the same way, alone in the beginning, until funding was found. She said that, “Of course there must be some money, but that is not the most important thing. If you want to say something with your film, your cinema, your art, you must say it. You cannot wait….It is a passion inside you. Either it is a fire inside you or you must do something else. Cinema is a very difficult profession.” She said that she has tried to explain this to youth in Armenia, who are discouraged by lack of money and other obstacles.

Stepanyan exclaimed, “I am very lucky to be able to live through my art. This is of course in part due to my husband. My husband does all so that I can work in my art.” This year Stepanyan had maternity leave, but the two years prior to this she gave workshops in schools, for the 5^th, 10^th and 12^th grade, to teach youth how to make films. She said she likes this very much because children do not have the filters adults have, and so have greater freedom and creativity.

With two children now and three projects she wants to work on (at least two of which are connected with Armenia), she said she does not want to spend much time on festivals promoting her already completed works, as it takes much energy. She said, “I prefer to work more on new creations.” Consequently, she picks and chooses in which festivals she will participate.

Fortunately, she said, she now has a good producer and is not alone in this venue. La Huit is going to prepare DVDs of her three documentary films and her short fiction.

Change through Film

Stepanyan wants to show this film in Armenia. It has not yet been seen in Lichk. She hopes the film will be accepted by the Golden Apricot Film Festival and afterwards can be taken to the villages to raise understanding and perhaps even create change.

“The pain in me,” she exclaimed, “Why would the men go? There was nothing in Russia. They are slaves there to Russian people. What do they do there? Make sidewalks, asphalt…so perhaps indirectly I wanted to bring them awareness so that they would not go. The awareness that each time they left, they would not see how their children grow. Yet each year they return, the children have grown another year, and their youth passes by. What do they understand of life?”

After the film was completed, at least three men returned to live in the village. She does not know if this happened as a result of the film, but she wonders if the women did it. She said, “Perhaps all the questions we raised moved something, and the men understood that they were destroying their lives.”

She concluded, “I changed something at least in this village.” At the same time, she accepted that major economic change was necessary in the villages to provide suitable employment for the men. Apparently there is talk that the Chinese have bought an old factory in the area which they are going to start up, but it is not certain.

In any case, Stepanyan has succeeded through her work in becoming part of the life of Lichk’s women and perhaps part of the price she paid is to accept some of the burden of their lives on her shoulders. She said, “It is difficult. At times I felt I was a psychologist.” She did inspire Anush’s children with love for cinema. They normally would not have seen real cinema, with YouTube being the main source of videos for them, unless they could come to distant Yerevan.

Under the current circumstances, she said, “Those women [of Lichk] for me are not simply women, they are heroines. That strength, that beauty in them is very difficult to preserve. I feel that this film has great spirit in it, great pain.”