YEREVAN – A retrospective screening of the films featuring New York and Paris-based Armenian actress Nora Armani, took place October 1-3, at the Yerevan Cinema House, presented by the Union of Film Professionals of Armenia. According to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Armani has appeared in some 30 films and television productions. She has also performed on stage internationally. The Yerevan program included Ara Yernjakyan’s “Deadline in Seven Days” (1991, Armenia), Harutyun Khachatryan’s “Last Station” (1994, Armenia), and Rax Rinnekangas’s “The Last Wish” (2024, Finland-Spain).
We sat down with the renowned actress regarding her acting in the last film.
Dear Nora, I am very glad you are a central figure in Rax Rinnekangas’s film “The Last Wish,” an international project. The main hero of the film goes to a monastery to fulfill “The Last Wish” of his dying theatre coach mentor friend: to read every page of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov three times. You portray Dostoyevsky’s main female characters, though in quite an unusual way — not so much physically, but in the ideas they represent. When accepting the roles, did you reread the novel? And, more generally, is Dostoyevsky among the writers who are close to your artistic temperament?
My characters in the film are more symbolic renditions of Dostoyevsky’s characters, rather than true portrayals of them. In fact, the film makes use of the Dostoyevsky novel, but is not the story of the novel. It uses the philosophy behind it and the incidents in it to draw parallels with what is happening in the world around us today. These parallels appear in the life of the film’s hero. Although I am familiar with the work, my reading of the 1000-page novel back-to-back, apart from pure curiosity and literary re-education, would not have helped the film much. Instead, I made myself available to the director’s interpretation — what he wanted my character to do and say — and I immersed myself in the experience.
The film conveys a strong message that, in our uneasy times — marked by wars and humanity’s growing dependence on technology — reading great literature may serve as a kind of remedy or salvation.
Indeed. Rax Rinnekangas is a well-known published author in Finland, in addition to being a photographer and a filmmaker. Some of his novels are also published in France and other countries. His belief in the power of literature, and in the importance of books in our lives is so strong that four of his latest films are based on the theme of books and literature. “The Last Wish” is one of these films, and its underlying philosophy is that great literature belongs to humanity and should not be politicized in any way. On the contrary, in its pages lies humanity’s salvation. His newer film after “The Last Wish,” is “Jukebox, “which was released this year, and is inspired from the eponymous novel by Nobel Prize winning author Peter Handke. I play a lead role in that film too. Sadly, because of the widespread influence of social media, books are losing their place in our lives, and the film is a wakeup call to us human beings about the loss of important values.
