A Passage
16:57, 2K Video
Single Channel
2019
Film Festivals
Screening Rights Film Festival of Social Justice, 2024
Prix George for the Best Documentary Form at the 24th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, 2020
Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, 2020
Kyiv International Short Film Festival, 2020
Doclisboa International Film Festival, 2019
Aesthetica International Film Festival, 2019
Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, 2019
Special Screenings
Washing of the Eyes
Programmers of the Future: Humie Pourseyf
Eye Filmmuseum
Amsterdam, Netherlands
July 2, 2025
LINK
‘A Passage’ Screening
Organized by Architektūros fondas LINA Fellows Diāna Mikāne, and Paula Veidenbauma
Institut Français
Vilnius, Lithuania
June 18, 2025
LINK
Reviews
A Passage Trailer
“…a film whose artistic rigour is not overshadowed by its political urgency –despite the latter growing day by day. This film builds on the legacy of poetic cinema to amplify its political message about borders, capital flows, and militarism in the present-day Southern Caucasus –a message that is just as timely in any other part of the world.”
- Jury for Prix George for the Best Documentary, 24th Internationale Kurtzfilmtage Winterthur, 2020
‘A Passage’ is a film which tackles the political economy and social ecology of border infrastructures in Southern Armenia. By focusing on two significant events that illustrate the dominant political shifts in the region, ‘A Passage’ looks at how processes of rapid militarization and neoliberalization have restructured these borders. These two events include the recent erasure of the historic Yerevan-Baku Railway; and the upcoming construction of an industrial Free Economic Zone (FEZ) planned precisely where the removed train infrastructure was housed. The scrapping of the railway symbolizes the socio-political adherence to maintaining strict mobility regimes for citizens, while the introduction of the FEZ signals how capital supersedes these bodily restrictions and borders. The film stitches together various contested sites of the region including Meghri’s abandoned airport (which is slated to be refurbished as the forward command of Russia’s Middle Eastern operations), a functioning Soviet-era Copper and Molybdenum mine, a 16th century church (which is the last remaining building of a village abandoned by the mines expansion) the abandoned Karchivan and Meghri train stations and an abandoned rail tunnel that bridges the geopolitical boundary of Nakhchivan and Armenia.
Made possible with the generous support of:
