Film Unveiling the Voice of Armenian Women

ARCANE VOICES

A film directed by Marie Yevkiné Tirard and Gohar Martirosyan including original experimental music for Saz and voice composed from the poems of Yevkiné Diarian, a young woman exiled in 1915. Her poems, in Western Armenian, instruments of survival, remained silent relics until they were rediscovered 100 years later.

" Կը մտածեմ թէ պիտի գայ օր մը ուր ես ակամայ

Պիտի տանեմ սեւ հողին յանձնել իղձերս բոլոր,

Ալ աչքերըս չունենան պիտի իրենց առաջուայ,

Կեանքով խոցերն ու թաքուն խորուրդները"

"One day will come,

When I will return to the black earth all my desires,

My eyes will no longer have as before

Living wounds and newly in love secret thoughts "

The project transforms her solitary, unspoken words into an immersive film and collective resonance. The poetics of the language is reincarnated within a contemporary version of the mystical Ashugh (troubadour), where music, storytelling, and philosophical reflection intertwine. The Saz is played as an extension of the voice.

Visually and sonically, the music unfolds in the haunting landscape of Western Armenia, with the camera moving like a breath, tracing the fading boundary between voice, absence, and memory. The project rejects nostalgia as mere mourning, instead transforming it into a form of creative resistance.

______________________________________________________

Synopsis

A young woman, Yevkiné, traverses a silent and unstable landscape—wind, the dry climate of the mountains of Diyarbakir—accompanied only by a donkey and the remnants of a home she can no longer return to. Layered in fabric, memory, and silence, she moves slowly across cracked plains, rivers, and barren stone, burdened by carpets, textiles, and totemic fragments of an allegorical identity she left behind.

As she performs quiet rituals—cleaning her body, burying small objects, building and rebuilding shelter—her voice gradually emerges from beneath the surface: a murmur, a breath, a song. The donkey, her only witness, mirrors her existence while no other soul is around.

Through a series of long shots, the film traces the erosion—or emancipations—of belonging, the impossibility of return, and the inability to speak with anyone. Belongings are scattered, abandoned, or claimed by the wind. Her body, soaked and slowed by time and landscape, continues forward, until only the voice remains—untethered, immaterial, and persistent—calming her and following her as a separated identity.

Arcan Voices is a meditation on exile, fragility, and the quiet ritual of survival. It is not a story of redemption, but of disappearance made visible.