Remembering Yervant Gianikian (1942–2026)
We are deeply saddened to hear of the passing of avant-garde filmmaker Yervant Gianikian. Together with his partner Angela Ricci Lucchi, he built a vast reputation in the world of experimental cinema, and was a regular at IFFR, with films like Dal polo all’equatore (1986), Io ricordo (1997) and Oh! Uomo (2004), as well as the I diari di Angela trilogy (2018, 2019, 2025).
Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi were partners in life and art for more than 40 years. After her passing in 2018, Gianikian went on to remarry (to writer Lucrezia Lerro), but he continued to co-sign the films he made from their personal archives with her name – which tells us a lot about the nature of their collaboration: how the materials they shot together are imbued with both their spirits, and how their montages are the result of decades of working side by side. Now, on 3 July 2026, Gianikian has passed on as well.
Over the last quarter century, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi were often guests of IFFR, with films both short and long, but in 2003 – as part of the programme True Stories – also with Terra Nullius, an installation which had its world premiere here. These were also the years when the pair enjoyed their widest international recognition, including participating in documenta 14 in 2017 and a share of the Golden Lion that Armenia won for its pavilion in 2015.
The son of an Armenian genocide survivor who grew up in Italy, far from what always felt like home, Gianikian made history and memory the centre of the art he created together with Ricci Lucchi from the early 1970s onwards. Their sense of the historical meaning found not only in archival images but in the cinematic material itself was unique – something that was only truly appreciated after many films and many years. They were always ahead of their time, and at IFFR we will continue to reconsider the past through the art they’ve left us.
We will miss Yervant the way we’ve already been missing Angela, knowing that their spirit of enlightenment, remembrance and compassion will be with us whenever we show their films.
– by Olaf Möller
