“Here’s” heroes move through Armenia and its remarkable landscape
Lubna Azabal and Ben Foster
In-country production finished earlier this month on what is said to be Armenia’s first feature film produced and shot here by non-Armenians.
“Here” is the story of an American satellite-mapping engineer – Will Shepard – who is sent to Armenia on a surveying mission. While on the job Will meets Gadarine Najarian an Armenian photographer who has recently returned to the homeland after living for years in Canada and Europe.
According to the film synopsis (www.herefilm.com): “Will and Gadarine move through Armenia and its remarkable landscape photographing measuring, and experiencing the trip in their own individual ways and, ultimately, through each other’s eyes. Their journey takes them across the length of the country, from the Lori region in the north to the Iranian border in the south, and finally into the diplomatically undefined Nagorno-Karabagh region. It is here that they are forced to confront their intensifying relationship and the difficult questions it raises.”
“Will” is played by American actor Ben Foster, who appeared with Russell Crowe in last year’s “3:10 to Yuma” and also starred in “X-Men 3”. Among other roles, he played an intense, scary and deranged methamphetamine addict in the bizarre 2006 movie alongside Justin Timberlake in “Alpha Dog”.
The role of “Gadarine” is played by France-based Lubna Azabal, who has 15 films to her credit, including “Paradise Now” (nominated for an Academy Award), and she was also the lead actress in “Aram”, by French-Armenian filmmaker Robert Kechichian.
Neither actor had been to Armenia prior to production of “Here”, which lasted about two months beginning in July.
Azabal who is of Moroccan descent and speaks French, Arabic, Spanish, Dutch and English, said her major challenge was learning enough Armenian to make her character believable – a task that had her in tears when she first started learning her role.
“I thought, ‘how am I ever going to do this’?” she said on the final day of shooting in early September. “I had no reference for the language. It was a nightmare.”
Azabal worked with a language coach and downloaded Armenian dialogue onto her Ipod and listened time and again until she could at least phonetically capture her lines in Armenian. (The movie itself is shot in English, but the character of Gadarine has interaction with her family and others that was set in Armenian.)
“Here”, written by New York filmmaker Braden King, is a “road movie”, with nearly every day of shooting taking place in a different location – a characteristic that was a grueling challenge for the crew of 38, half of which is Armenian and the rest from several nationalities.
“We knew that what we were doing was ambitious,” said “Here” producer Lars Knudsen. “But traveling across the country in 12 vehicles, with a crew of five or six nationalities to places where the people had never seen a film crew and perhaps not even a non-Armenian before?...”
The experience, says Knudsen, was humbling, and turned him and others as much toward philosophy as to filmmaking – especially after filming was delayed for three weeks while importing equipment and dealing with various levels of bureaucracy.
“Every time something bad happened we came to embrace it,” the producer said, “and just say ‘this is here for a reason’. And the thing that was bad turned into something better.”
The actors, the producer, and the writer – each speaking to ArmeniaNow in separate interviews – had the same high praise for how they were received by average locals.
King, who first visited Armenia in 2004, called the production “a deeply affecting experience for everyone involved”. Azabal said she found Armenia to be “poetic”.
But it was Knudsen and Foster who took home more of Armenia than most.
During one of their last nights here, they, along with some others on the team, went to a tattoo salon. When they came out, inside his right bicep Knudsen had the phrase (inked in Armenian) “This is Armenia”. On his right hand, Foster put the Armenian letters for “TIA” – “This is Armenia”.
Foster explained that it had become a catch-phrase among the crew, who learned it from crew member Zack Valladian who, Foster said “kept our boat floating”.
“Every time we’d get frustrated over something that didn’t go the way we thought it should, Zack would just say ‘T.I.A., baby, T.I.A.’”
The Moroccan actress said she found familiarity in the Armenian tradition of family. Meanwhile, as he set to leave, the American actor was still processing his opinion.
“You can’t pin this place down,” Foster said. “It is at once extraordinarily conservative, yet vigorously celebratory...”
The “Here” script has won major awards, including the prestigious Cannes Film Festival Atelier (2008), and the Sundance / NHK International Filmmakers Award (2008).
Following several months of post-production work, it is hoped that “Here” will make its Armenian premiere at next year’s Golden Apricot Film Festival.
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