“The falling of a leaf is quieter than the felling of a forest, but it tells us just as much about the coming of autumn.”
Anon
It is a truism of introductory film school courses that the camera should show and not tell. In her first feature documentary, “There was, There Was Not,” American director Emily Mkrtichian lets her camera seep into the lives of four women from Artsakh, whom we follow before, during and after the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, all the way up to the surrender and evacuation by Artsakhtsis of this historically Armenian land.
Svetlana (Sveta) Haratunyan works as a minesweeper; Siranoush Sargsyan is an aspiring politician; Gayané Hambardzumyan, a women’s rights activist; and Sose Balasanyan, a world-class judo competitor who gives lessons to young children in Stepanakert. These four brave women try to better their communities in this idyllic Artsakh setting.
We meet Sveta while she is picnicking by a riverbank with her two daughters. They eat fresh mulberries, make jokes and splash water at each other. There are references throughout the film to Artsakh being like heaven. Here and in sweeping shots of the surrounding mountains, we feel that this is perhaps indeed the case.
Some images that remain after a first viewing include a chair in the middle of a field where Sose and the others take turns sitting, and the filmmaker running to hug one of the women as she breaks down and cries. The recurring image of water boiling over as Gayané, now a refugee in Yerevan prepares Armenian coffee and worries about not having the proper cups to serve it in. Later she describes to one of the other women her memory of the rustling of leaves as air traverses the trees in the village of Jdrduz. One of them says: “People who saw what happened think they understand. But they don’t…The place (Artsakh), becomes part of you.”
