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David D'Arcy sends word from the capital of Armenia.

At the Golden Apricot International Film Festival in Yerevan, Armenia, now marking its fifth year, international cinema is meeting the culture of this small nation whose diaspora reaches from the former Soviet Union to Paris, Santa Monica and Toronto. Armenia does not have much film production today, one to two features in a good year and those are made on low budgets (and then there are the documentaries, made with a lot of heart and even less money). But it did have its own active studio under the Soviet system, and its film culture runs deep.

Sergei Paradjanov (1924-90), an Armenian born in Georgia, is commemorated in the extraordinary museum that bears his name and reveals a restless vibrant imagination (and these are just his drawings and assemblages). Most of Paradjanov's work was banned in his lifetime for its transgression of rules mandating Socialist Realism, and he spent more than four years in prison. Paradjanov's objects range from wildly inventive satirical collages that combine the influences of Arcimboldo with a sensibility like that of Joseph Cornell and drawings, like his finely-rendered pictures of friends from prison, that convey emotional depth. The museum alone warrants a visit to Yerevan. The food and cognac, and the people, might keep you here for a while.

Paradjanov (or Paronian, as his name would be in Armenian) once said, "Beauty will save the world," before he died of lung cancer at the age of 66. Now Armenians in film from around the world have converged on the GAIFF this week, and there is much talk of co-productions and plans to shoot here. An American firm has bought the Soviet-Era Hyefilm (Armenian Film) Studio, and is committing funds to renovate it into a hub for production and location services. The Central Partnership, a Russian distribution and production house run by Armenians (as a number of them are in Moscow), has avoided much involvement in Armenia, but its new film, Mermaid (winner of Sundance's international feature competition last year) is the work of Anna Melikian, an Armenian woman living in Moscow. Relations between Russians and Armenians are far more friendly here than in neighboring Georgia, where Russia funds insurgencies in the North and bans the import of Georgian wine, a product that is so identified with Georgia that its patron saint is depicted holding a cross made of vine branches.

Still, though, Armenia lacks modern cinemas and there are none on the drawing board. So far, as the construction cranes all around town suggest, this cinematic renaissance is another work in progress.

New Armenian documentaries at the GAIFF were a mixed bag, often showing the austerity of their budgets on the screen. For an outsider, however, they were a revelation. Two films looked at the assassination in March 2007 of Hrant Dink, the journalist and editor of Agos, a newspaper in Istanbul that publishes in the Turkish language and pushes for Turkish recognition of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, improbably, as part of a effort to bring Armenian and Turks together, an ambitious and seemingly impossible task if there ever was one.

The documentaries, by performer and Gorky biographer Nouritza Matossian (Heart of Two Nations: Hrant Dink) and by Hrant Hakobyan (Eternal Flight: Hrant Dink) seem to assume that the audience is familiar with the factual detail of Dink's killing by Turkish nationalists, aided by the indifference or active collaboration of the Turkish military. Each depicts Dink as a prophet for peacemaking, a humanitarian who led open conversations about history in the face of threats to his life. Matossian is now seeking to remake her own documentary, sub-titled in English (with an English voice-over by the director), which began as a series of video-taped conversations in Armenian with the murdered journalist.

Even as Dink's killing points to enduringly acute Turkish opposition to any official recognition of the Genocide (just look at the intense lobbying in the US against Congressional resolutions marking the tragedy of 1915), there were Turkish jurors on two of the GAIFF juries, a deliberate step in the right direction.

The documentary Who is Monte, by Edward Badounts, takes up the story of Monte Melkonian, a California-born American killed in the Nagorno Karabach War after two years of commanding Armenian troops in the region that fought for its independence from neighboring Azerbaijan, and won it in 1994. (Only Armenia recognizes the new government there.) If Armenia were more of a draw at the box office, this story would have been made into a Hollywood feature years ago.

Monte (as everyone seems to have called the charismatic hero whom Armenia now honors) graduated from Berkeley, traveled the world, and by the late 1970s found his way into radical groups that practiced the kind of violent hostage-taking and assassinations which we associate with the more visible Red Army Faction, Irish Republican Army and Red Brigades of those years. The Beirut-based Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (or ASALA) tended toward shooting Turkish diplomats, although it was abandoned (some say sold out) by its former allies in the Palestine Liberation Organization and broke into violent factions in the early 1980s. Monte spent the years 1986 through 1989 in prison in France for traveling with false papers and carrying an illegal handgun. At the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was in Armenia, having taught himself the language. He soon became a participant in the war in Nagorno-Karabach, which then sought independence from Azerbaijan. Before long he was commanding unpaid and untrained troops.

The film, narrated by Monte's widow, Seta Kbranian, takes you in and out of Monte's military and personal lives. The saga of a war fought by citizens who became soldiers overnight calls to mind the early days of Israel and the images of mountain fighting could have been lifted from the Bosnian archives. The tone of the film is romantic, patriotic and motivational, but the young widow's voice is poignant, and leaves you wanting to know more about her husband and his journey from suburbia to a war halfway around the world.

Another documentary, Vandals of the 21st Century, shows that the war with Azerbaijan has taken its cultural toll. In Julfa, which is in the region of Nakichevan (an Armenian territory now controlled by Azerbaijan), a cemetery of thousands of Khachkars, massive gravestones with carved crucifixes, was hacked apart by soldiers from Azerbaijan's army with sledgehammers. The pieces of the 400-year old carvings were then put in trucks and dumped into a ravine. Much of the destruction was videotaped from a distance by Armenians, and the short documentary by Ashot Movsisyan follows the soldiers as they smash the irreplaceable objects.

The film quotes from a letter sent by the chief Islamic cleric of Azerbaijan, informing concerned Armenians who watched the video (which is more extensive than the sections shown in the documentary) that his government is taking measures to protect Armenian heritage there. It's rare that antiquities vandals are caught in such a flagrant act. As Donald Rumsfeld said when asked to explain why Iraq's National Museum could be looted while heavily armed US troops stood by, "Stuff happens." Here the troops were ordered to obliterate a graveyard, presumably to discourage Armenians from ever thinking of this territory as their home. It's hard to watch.

(To see a Khachkar, you can visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where one carving is currently on loan from Armenia.)

- David D'Arcy 

David D'Arcy is the American host, writer and co-producer of "Independent Minds," the award-winning public radio series on trends in contemporary film. He covered the cultural scene for National Public Radio for two decades. He has also worked as a reporter and critic for BBC Radio and television, and for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, covering stories in North America, Latin America, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Economist, Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal, Metropolis and many other publications. He is a correspondent for The Art Newspaper, a monthly published in London, and he is a contributing editor at Art & Auction, which covers the international art market. He is also a contributor to The Architects' Newspaper, which has become the news bible for anyone in architecture and design. Mr. D'Arcy is known for his live interviews of filmmakers at festivals around the world. His current writing on film can be read daily on GreenCine.com