A refrigerator truck loaded with humanitarian aid arrives in Armenia. The drivers are unable to locate the road to Yerevan and keep looking for it. Parallel to this a string of ludicrous stories unfolds. This is the story of Radio Yerevan in a nutshell, according to its makers. They added: ‘This looks like a simple rendition of the main plot, but it certainly isn’t. The truck is not important, nor is the fact that the drivers only find Yerevan when they leave the town, nor even the chain of extremely ludicrous events, nor the boy’s flashbacks to the sixties, nor the ‘radio’ effects that play with reality, nor even the eroticism.The substance of this film cannot be put into words and the plot can at most be expressed in a poetic image: ‘within the depth of your blue eyes my heart is yearning for the golden splash’.The need for this film today was hanging in the air. The film is so short that it does not distinguish between important and irrelevant, black and white, hours and seconds. The film is laughter you wouldn’t want to share with others, like secret self-inflicted wounds. We simply tried to open up the innermost, most fragile and cherished layers of our egos and the instinct to survive makes us laugh. And the laughter drives us mad.Our country is at war today and that frightens us. But if we’re scared, we fight more bravely, confront death more daringly and end up laughing. What makes us laugh? Is it war, death or bravery? We do not aspire to provide ready answers with the film, we’re all in the same boat. We merely cry out about what you hear in the outcry. Take it or leave it: this is our expression of the self. Radio Yerevan was made with the support of the Rotterdam Film Festival.
