PARIS – French-Armenian Anahit Simonian is a creative polymath, performing on the piano in various genres, composing music and writing film scripts, while moving back and forth between Spain and France each year. This year she was chosen to participate in the Berlinale Talents of the Berlin International Film Festival. She says that this week, she is really enjoying it, having meetings with filmmakers like Apichapong Weerasethakul (Thailand) or Mohammad Rasoulof from Iran.
Born in Yerevan, she presciently declared somewhere between the ages of four and eight years that she would one day live in Paris and become a filmmaker, Simonian said in an interview with the Mirror-Spectator.
When she was 20, she entered the “Mozart du 7ème Art” prize created by CANAL+ at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, a competition for music for a movie, by chance, she said. She won, but it took a lot of effort. After also winning during the same year a SACEM (Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique) prize and the Sony Music Special Prize for Young Composers, she went on to write over 25 original soundtracks for films, collaborating with well known filmmakers such as Bertrand Tavernier, Isaki Lacuesta, Jean-Bernard Marlin and Meritxell Colell.
Making Music Like Drinking Water
Her parents are both professional musicians, with her father Felix a composer, cellist and member of the famous Komitas Quartet, and her mother a doctor of musicology (and also of psychology). As a teenager, she moved to Moscow with her family for two years. Then she went to Paris to finish her conservatory studies and stayed there some 12 or 14 years.
She said she became tired of the rainy weather and wanted to explore the south. She met her husband Guillaume Poussou, who is a French photographer, in Barcelona. Both of them have various artistic projects, in France, Spain and Switzerland, and sometimes also work together. Simonian said, “We are very lucky because this is possible, and we have good artist friends with whom we can do projects.”