Philippe Khazarian: ‘Here I am, with many others, watching and celebrating a new era – believing that images can have their own doubts. I will never forget my first ride on the back seat of a scooter. I was five. My father had lost me in Lyon’s immense national park while I was performing cartwheels. Alone, surrounded by hundreds of Sunday-afternoon strollers, while the French National Police were looking for me. I finally decided to hitchhike on the nearby road. A stranger jumped off his scooter and started questioning me. What was I doing here on my own? Why was I crying? Where was my home? We were soon flying along the streets of Lyon. Under the helmet, I couldn’t tell who this adult was. There were no introductions and when we said goodbye, at the front door, he held me and made sure that I would always remember that he, who saved me that day, was a man.’Khazarian’s unusual film is a love story set at the end of the nineties, when a short visit to a war zone in Karabach evokes memories of both the terrible fate of the city and his own personal tragedy years earlier in France. Khazarian links both emotional lines in a surprising cinematographic investigation of his own and the collective memory. The French-British production was shot on 35mm, partly on Super 8 and DV and will be projected on digital video with Dolby Surround.
