In the world of cinema, where political stories often dominate the scenario, filmmaker Edgar Baghdasarin focuses on the deep personal and often horrific experiences of individual navigating tubes-historical changes.
His film Yasha and Leonid Brezhnev It came out in 2024, the Bangalore International Film Festival (Biffes) was displayed in 2025, and provides a unique window in and later during the Soviet era, at a time when nations such as Armenia were governed by a centralized system that also demanded control over artistic expression.
Edgar said on the edge of BIFS, “The tragicomedi allows me to find out the subjects that I care, such as a person’s experience of losing his world and he was not ready to find himself in a new reality,” Edgar said on the edge of BIFS
sign of the times
The Soviet era made important challenges to the artists who often faced pressure to suit the party line, which depicted the worker as a socialist hero and ensured that any representation of social life, including religion, was aligned with official beauty.
A still Yasha and Leonid Brezhnev Armenian filmmaker Edgar Bagdasarin | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
During the Soviet era, filmmakers responded to these obstacles in various ways. Filmmakes Sergei Parzanov and Andre Tarkowski were observed for their resistance to this compulsory beauty. He sought to revive symbols associated with a strand of pre-revolutionary Russian intellectual idea, seeking “end of history”-and a new ideal world’s beginning-a Jewish-Christians through apocalypse. In the development of his author, literary figures like Maxim Gorky play with the idea of ​​creating the same figure as a new God.
Parzanov, with Tarcovski, is characterized by a avant-garde, lyrical approach, characteristic of the imagination of dreams, a painter of light and composition, and a passion for folk and Christian motifs. Their use of symbolist imagination was often esoteric and unclear from the party point of view, causing censorship and some of his films being sheltered for years, partially due to their religious content.
Edgar chose a separate route Yasha and Leonid Brezhnev – Tragics. “Parzanov refused to conform to socialist realism, official party aesthetics; what he did was artisticly incredible,” he says. However, Edgar explains his own artistic motivations. “While Parzanov’s approach was a form of resistance, my goal is not to justify or criticize politics; my goals are meta-political. I am particularly interested in human factor.”
Time portal
Nayak, Yasha, is a symbol of this experience. He halots ‘friend’ conversation with data like Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Edgar sees Yasha representing an entire generation, which suddenly loses his meaning about the meaning of his life and found himself adrift.
Armenian filmmaker Edgar Bagdasarin | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
The 61 -year -old filmmaker delays complex relations between the current and the past, suggests that individuals often look at the past to respond to current problems. He says that whatever the formed of us, the roots of individuals are in the past, and he sees these roots as political – taste, smell, happiness, humiliation, first love and first kisses like kisses. “All answers in the past stems from our experience of things. This is the basis of everything that comes after that.”
Nevertheless, the stiffness between the present and the past is not logical; It is also absurd in the case of Yasha’s hallucinations. It is clearly not unique for the escapest strategy, Edgar notes, the older generation, as “the younger generation is also running into the digital universe”.
A municipal waste is an operator in a reprocessing unit as an operator, a metaphor to a metaphor dull smell. “That smell attaches themselves to something and is impossible to disappear. It is a cruel metaphor applied to those who make the previous generation allegations wildly for all the existing diseases of the society.”
While the present generations can be appropriate in making such an allegation in the context of the extremist regime of the past, Edgar argues that the era of Lyonid Brezhnev, despite many ideals, did not represent a extremist.
A still Yasha and Leonid Brezhnev Armenian filmmaker Edgar Bagdasarin | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Edgar trusts in the essence of personal feeling. “While the biochemistry makes us all equal, it is a personal feeling that makes each person unique.”
Recognition
According to Edgar, true art should “integrate inquiries in universal moral law as it can create true happiness. The art helps you to live and not only exists,” they say, in contemporary armenia, artists, artists must believe in the possibility of “miracles, be engaged with hope, and the world should be attached to the world through arts”.
Even his music options reflect his beauty. “As a rule, I want to weave music in the fabric of the story and do not include it as a pasti. I seek biological reasons to do so.”
Generous option of music PrimeFor example, Serbian songs about Kosovo are deliberately echoing with Armenia’s Karbakh issue. However, he says, from another point of view, “music gaps and scenes are an indicator that Yasha was deprived of real life – good food and drinks, beautiful women’s company, and going to foreign places, who were regular for leaders with whom he now judges in his changed reality.
Focusing on the purpose of art and its own legacy, Edgar says, “If my films can also question an audience for the lack of life for transactions or help them get a glimpse of a holy in worldly, the legacy is sufficient. Parzanov taught me through his work. Pomegranate color, That beauty and pain is inseparable. And it is only art that can serve as a frank for numbness. ,
Published – May 21, 2025 12:34 pm IST
