“The zigzag scissor is bad,” 12-year-old Vrej winces, the nape of his neck inches from the blade. “It’s hurting me.” That reluctant recipient of “a true man’s haircut” is also the sensitive hero of My Sweet Land (2024), Sareen Hairabedian’s first documentary feature, which follows an ethnic Armenian family during the Second Artsakh War.
As the film unfolds, Vrej, the eldest of three, transforms from a flower-picking dreamer who wants his own pigeon to a veritable soldier in training. “There are so many bad things happening now,” he sighs to the camera, fiddling his hands outside the home that he shares with displaced relatives. “In the ancient times, elephants were used as tanks, and stones were used like slingshots.
But when guns were invented, worse times have begun.” Hairabedian stays out of the frame throughout the documentary, directing our attention to Vrej’s lived experience and pensive rumination, from his joyful visits to his grandma’s house down the road to his family’s demoralizing discovery that, after the war’s ceasefire, almost 75% of the Republic of Artsakh (also known by the Russian name Nagorno-Karabakh) has been ceded to Azerbaijan. Well aware that the “sweet land” he calls home — the mountainous enclave of Tsaghkashen — was contested decades before his birth, Vrej weighs his aversion to violence against his growing sense of nationalism, and the feeling that there is no other option.
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