MY SWEET LAND: A Somber Warning Call To History, Past, Present, and Future

When we speak about ‘relevance’ or ‘importance’ in cinema, especially that which covers issues that are currently in the forefront of our political and social minds, it generally comes from a place of wanting cinema itself to be important. That the act of watching films, engaging with them, can be a form of education or empathy. I agree with the first word if not the second as much. When I went to the Prismatic Ground Film Festival in New York City earlier this year, it was stressed that, while protests across NYC and the genocides occurring in Gaza and West Bank were ongoing, the films curation of films, many of them by Palestinian artists, could serve as a balm or energizer to inspire us to organize, protest, and fight. It’s easy to feel jaded about sitting and watching a movie with everything that’s going on, but isn’t the act of making a movie, especially a political one, as meant to be watched?

A Terror Too Familiar

source: ARTE France

Sareen Hairabedian’s My Sweet Land, premiering at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival in Sheffield, England, is a movie that has many recognizable images for anyone who has been paying attention to the news over the past three years, be it in Ukraine, Palestine, or in the film’s own Artsakh (also known as Nogorno-Karabakh). The news footage of tanks rolling down the street crushing and rumbling through the roadside rubble, destruction or homes and land, of people carted in the back of trucks. Clothing and garments are all packed inside homes in anticipation of the next shelling or invasion from Azerbaijani troops and the documentary zeroes in on the instability of such an existence and the normality of it as appearing not just on camera in the doc, but on news footage that are shown on TVs and social media platforms around the world. We’ve seen these images before and it sadly seems like we’ll be seeing them for the conceivable future. If anything, My Sweet Land is not just a movie about the ‘relevance’ of the present, it’s a movie that speaks to existence in time immemorial.

Lessons Unlearned

Hairabedian takes a fully educational approach at the beginning of the doc, with the central figure, an 11 year old boy named Vrej, looking at a map and pointing out his hometown in the vicinity between Armenia and Azerbaijan. We even get a scene inside a classroom where a teacher lectures students about the idea of ‘independence’ as a country and what constitutes sovereignty. The daily scenes of the village set the tone of a comfortable and rustic existence of the locals, one which is still steeped in a tradition that focuses on self-reliance as a people, but community and family as a collective. The complete disruption of these early scenes with the invasion is anticipatory, but it still feels shocking in its abruptness in the film’s editing. Suddenly, we are seeing Vrej and his family displaced and in Yeravan, the capital city of Armenia.

source: ARTE France

Conclusion

There are so many parallels the film draws to events in both Ukraine and especially the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza that is almost feels surreally curated. Vrej is riding in a car and a radio broadcast lists the ‘martyrs’ killed in a recent invasion. As the names are read, the birth and death years are as well and you suddenly start calculating the time difference and realize these are all children. The history is so intertwined, the territorial disputes, the ethnic cleansing campaigns, the invasion and backing of foreign powers so recognizable that it makes the head spin in context of how this keeps happening not only time after time, but simultaneously in many places at once. My Sweet Land is a somber warning call that its events are not contained in one place or time, they are the story of humanity, of its constant struggle, and its hope that maybe one day, we may learn from our own mistakes.

My Sweet Land premiered at the Sheffield Doc Film Festival on June 14, 2024.