Armenian filmmaker Edgar Baghdasaryan touches on artwork, identification and the human think about his works-OxBig News Network

In the world of cinema, the place political narratives usually dominate the panorama, filmmaker Edgar Baghdasaryan focuses on the deeply private and sometimes bewildering experiences of the person navigating tumultuous socio-historical shifts.

His movie Yasha and Leonid Brezhnev that got here out in 2024, was screened on the Bangalore International Film Festival (Biffes) 2025, and gives a novel window into the human situation throughout and after the Soviet period, a time when nations reminiscent of Armenia have been ruled by a centralised system that additionally sought management over creative expression.

“Tragicomedy allows me to explore the themes I care about, such as an individual’s experience of losing their world and finding themselves in a new reality they weren’t ready for,” Edgar stated on the sidelines of BIFFes

Sign of the occasions

The Soviet period introduced vital challenges for artists, who usually confronted strain to evolve to the celebration line, which mandated depicting the employee as a socialist hero and guaranteeing that any illustration of social life, together with faith, aligned with the official aesthetic.

Filmmakers through the Soviet period responded to those constraints in diversified methods. Filmmakers Sergei Parajanov and Andrey Tarkovsky have been celebrated for his or her resistance to this mandated aesthetic. They sought to revive symbolisms related to a strand of pre-revolutionary Russian mental thought which sought an “end of history” — and the start of a brand new splendid world — via a Judaeo-Christian apocalypse. Literary figures like Maxim Gorky of their writerly evolution toyed with the concept of constructing a brand new godlike determine.

Parajanov, together with Tarkovsky, employed an avant-garde, lyrical method characterised by dreamlike imagery, a painterly sense of lighting and composition, and a ardour for folks and Christian motifs. Their use of symbolist imagery was usually esoteric and ambiguous from the celebration’s perspective, resulting in censorship and a few of their movies being shelved for years, partly resulting from their spiritual content material.

Edgar selected a special route for Yasha and Leonid Brezhnev — tragicomedy. “Parajanov refused to conform to socialist realism, the official party aesthetic; what he did was artistically incredible,” he says. However, Edgar clarifies his personal creative motivations. “While Parajanov’s approach was a form of resistance, my goal is not to justify or critique politics; my goals are meta-political. I’m interested exclusively in the human factor.”

Time portal

The protagonist, Yasha, embodies this expertise. He hallucinates ‘buddy’ interactions with figures reminiscent of former Soviet chief Leonid Brezhnev. Edgar sees Yasha representing a complete technology, who with the collapse of the Soviet Union, out of the blue misplaced their sense of life’s which means and located themselves adrift.

Armenian filmmaker Edgar Baghdasaryan
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement 

The 61-year-old filmmaker delves into the complicated relationship between the current and the previous, suggesting that people usually look to the previous for solutions to present issues. He says a lot of what constitutes us as people have roots up to now, and he sees these roots as apolitical ­­— in issues like tastes, smells, joys, insults, past love, and one’s first kiss. “All the answers stem from our experience of things in the past. It is the basis of everything that comes after.”

Yet, the hyperlink between the current and the previous will not be logical; it’s even absurd as with the case of Yasha’s hallucinations. This evidently escapist technique, Edgar notes, will not be distinctive to the older technology, as “the younger generation too is escaping into the digital universe”.

Yasha’s job as an operator in a municipal waste reprocessing unit evokes a metaphoric lingering stench. “That stench attaches itself to something and is impossible to banish. It is a cruel metaphor applied to those who wildly accuse the previous generation for all the current ills of society.”

While current generations could also be justified in making such a cost within the context of extremist regimes of the previous, Edgar argues that the period of Leonid Brezhnev, regardless of many idiosyncrasies, didn’t signify an excessive authoritarianism.

A nonetheless from Yasha and Leonid Brezhnev by Armenian filmmaker Edgar Baghdasaryan
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement 

Edgar trusts within the essence of the person spirit. “While biochemistry makes us all the same, it is the individual spirit that makes each person unique.”

Belief system

According to Edgar, true artwork should provoke “inquiry into the universal moral law as it can generate true happiness. Art helps you live and not just exist,” he says, including that in modern Armenia, artists should “believe in the possibility of miracles, engage with hope and aim through art to make the world a better place”.

Even his musical decisions mirror his aesthetic. “As a rule I seek to weave music into the fabric of the narrative and not insert it as pastiche. I look for organic reasons for doing this.”

The eclectic decisions of music in Yasha, such because the Serbian track about Kosovo, are intentional, resonating with Armenia’s personal Karabakh situation. However, he says, from one other perspective, “the musical interludes and scenes are a pointer to what Yasha had been deprived of in real life — good food and drink, the company of beautiful women, and visits to exotic places, which were routine for the leaders with whom he now jostles in his altered reality. Yasha exults like Alice does in Wonderland — it is a land he doesn’t want to leave.”

Summing up on artwork’s goal and his personal legacy, Edgar says, ”If my movies could make even one viewer query the discount of life to mere transactions or assist them get a glimpse of the sacred within the mundane, that’s legacy sufficient. Parajanov taught me via his work, The Colour of Pomegranates, that magnificence and ache are inseparable. And that it’s only artwork that may act as antidote to numbness.”