When an artist stops taking risks, he stops being an artist; and art stops being art, when it is mixed with politics.

So were the viewpoints expressed by Canadian-Armenian film Director Atom Egoyan and his actress/wife Arsinee Khanjian at “Politics of Culture”, a dialogue presented in Yerevan by the Civilitas Foundation and Counterpart International.

“When [Sergei] Parajanov shot his ‘Color of Pomegranates’, many were criticizing him, and now it is a great gift for our nation. When shooting ‘Ararat’ I knew that I was taking a great risk - I was dealing with collective conscience issue, as well as other approaches to the same issue touched upon by other artists before. I knew that I could not go to Turkey, however, the film was created anyway,” Egoyan says.

The renowned director also said that the attention he had earned for previous acclaimed films made it timely to shoot ‘Ararat’, even though he was fully aware that everyone would criticize him for voicing a personal issue instead of following the film business success formula.

Both Egoyan and Khanjian spoke in support of artistic freedom. The actress says state structures must realize that the economic and social problems in any country, including Armenia, are tightly connected with the way national art is presented to the world.

Khanjian says that the key is in forming a kind of civil society that would rightfully feel entitled to both judge and criticize, if necessary, and raise important issues.