This Outreach Programme and Screening Guide was a follow-up to an earlier project, Dialogue Through Film, which produced a series of short films between 2006 and 2009 with funding from the United Kingdom. These involved over 30 young filmmakers from Azerbaijan and Nagorny Karabakh, helping them to connect across the divide and to work collectively on a creative product about the conflict that divides them. An important factor was that the Armenian participants came from Nagorny Karabakh. This was a rare opportunity for their voices to be heard and for young Karabakh Armenians to come into dialogue with young Azerbaijanis.
The aim of the outreach programme was to continue this dialogue by encouraging independent debate in Armenian and Azerbaijani societies about each other, the Nagorny Karabakh conflict, and the challenges around Armenian-Azerbaijani reconciliation.
The programme began with a series of facilitated screenings (with moderated discussions) and these fed into a handbook/screening guide aimed at people wanting to organise their own screenings and discussions.
The handbook was produced in Armenian, Azerbaijani, English and Russian and published in 2012, along with a selection of the films on DVD. It includes interviews and personal recollections from the films’ protagonists and other project participants as well as further resources.
The screenings included:
- around 90 facilitated screenings in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Nagorny Karabakh, reaching over 3,000 participants;
- screenings in London, New York and Washington, at universities, conferences and with diaspora groups; and
- two final film screenings in Stepanakert and Baku, held for the protagonists of the Dialogue Through Film series, who watched the films in which they had appeared several years before.
Audiences were lively and engaged, showing an interest in the unofficial perspectives and human stories depicted in the films. Project implementer Avaz Hasanov noted: “Over the year and a half that we were showing the films we found that although people were often initially suspicious, they were more than willing to get involved in some lively debate about the films, provided we could create the right environment for them to do so.”
The result was a wider public profile for the Dialogue Through Film series, showing that outreach was possible without access to mass media. However, the number of people reached was still relatively small.
Watch the films
