ANUSH VARDANYAN REJOINS ARI WRITERS' LIST
After a break, we are happy to welcome back Anush Vardanyan to the list of ARI Literary Agency writers.
Anush spent the last year and a half in Armenia doing an in-depth research of the life and work of Daniel Dznuni, the founder of Armenian film industry. The research has become a full non-fiction book presenting the story of a whole era, though the outstanding life of one person, whose tragic ending is symbolizing the end of a huge country gone wrong.
About Anush Vardanyan
Anush Vardanyan is a fiction writer, screenwriter and film director. She has graduated from Saint Petersburg State University of Film and Television in 1999 and has taken a screenwriting course at New York Film Academy in 2011.
She has a long filmography of around 20 films and television projects and 2 published novels – Wax (2014) and My Father is a Shoemaker and Don Corleone (2014). Her novel Paper Touches was self-published. As a screenwriter she is known for feature films Street-racers (2008), Backward Movement (2010), Vasilisa (2013), 72 hours (2015). In 2010 was awarded with respectable Russian Awards in cinematography Kinotavt for the best script for the feature film Backward Movement.
About the book
A Story of One Denunciation
The research of the life and the documented trial of the founder of Armenian film industry Daniel Dznuni presents the whole picture of an epoch when newly forming soviet states were trying to build their countries and how the period of Stalin repressions came to interfere with the prospects of development and independence for these countries. In April 1923, while heading the Main Political Department in the People’s Commissariat of Education, Dznuni initiated the creation of a film company and very soon also the other necessary establishments of film industry: movie theaters, construction company for film production and the first ever foreign brunch of a soviet state organization, which is the Iranian branch of Armenfilm company.
The bloody 1937, the year that wiped out an entire generation of the brightest of Soviet intellectuals, did not pass him by: Daniel was arrested, like almost every notable personality of the Stalin era. The denunciation was written by the head of production department to the People’s Commissariat of Finance, with figures, facts and quotes about “wrecking work of the directorate of Armenfilm” – that is Daniel Dznuni. During his first interrogation, following his arrest in 1937, Dznuni asked for permission to give his testimony in writing. The National Archive has preserved for us this more than 100-page manuscript – the unpublished memoirs of the first Armenian producer, in the very modern sense of the word. In his consistent and detailed story as well as other documents included in his trial archive you can see how the system works. A system that sent the majority if not all intellectuals, and leaders of different fields to prisons and to exile, from where only a few ever returned. Dzuni was lucky enough to be released after 8 years of imprisonment. But was the freedom worth witnessing how the industry created by him was going to be gradually destroyed by newcomers.