Paying tribute to Maria Sahakyan in Yerevan
When filmmaker Maria Sahakyan returned from Russia to Armenia and started looking for topics, she was asked what she wanted to shoot. The answer was forgotten towns. "Masha's eye spotted a topic for a film in a forgotten place like Alaverdi," Susanna Harutyunyan, a movie critic, remembered during an evening dedicated to this film director. As a tribute, Maria Sahakyan's film "I'm going to change my name" was screened at the Cinematographers' Union. It is about the 14-year-old girl's maternal relationship with her surroundings. The personal world of the teenager Evredike is presented in this film. The girl wants to change her name, hoping to change her life as well. "It's very important that the film finally got the name "I'm going to change my name" because it's quite autobiographical, the episodes that Maria showed are memories of her teenage years, "said the movie critic, underlining that the filmmaker's life and film were mixed. Filmmaker Artsvi Bakhchinyan, who is present at the film screening, knew Maria Sahakyan from very beginning. She considers movies are similar to personal diaries. "Through them, she painted some episodes of her biography in an elegant way. And through the heroes who were identical with her, she was trying to show her certain period of life, a state of mind, " Artsvi Bakhchinyan says. Artsvi Bakhchinyan describes the filmmaker, who dies a few days ago, at the age of 37, as a positive, bright, vivid person. According to the filmmaker, thanks to her open communication with the world, Maria Sahakyan was able to create a purely authoritative, very personal films, which speak about Armenia in international language, so her film actors are not Armenians and their language is not Armenian.
