Moving Mountains: The Centenary of Armenian Cinema
Screening Dates
  • June 16, 2023 8:45
New Restoration

“Hello, It’s Me received attention thanks to its Cannes selection … Using memory as its key element, this is a drama designed to awaken the nation’s consciousness: says the hero, ​‘recollections are not burdens, but hunger for the past.’”

Siranush Galstyan, Il Cinema Ritrovato

Frunze Dovlatyan’s third feature film and the first made in his home country, Hello, It’s Me is a cinematic harbinger of the modernist turn in Armenian visual culture. Unabashedly experimental, this sprawling tale of lost love and post-war ennui projects a boldly intellectual vision, which led to its selection for the official competition of the Cannes Film Festival in 1966. A fictionalized biopic of the great Armenian physicist Artem Alikhanyan, the film tells the story of a talented young scientist who looks back at the difficult choices and personal losses he experienced in order to realize a seemingly impossible dream of building an internationally renowned space-ray research centre on Aragats, Armenia’s highest mountain. Aided by Albert Yavuryan’s flowing widescreen cinematography and Martin Vardazaryan’s melancholic jazz score, the film captures the anxious spirit of the 1960s and raises issues pertaining to Armenia’s traumatic past.

In Armenian and Russian with English subtitles

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