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Filmstill Beauty and the Lawyer

Beauty and the Lawyer

Beauty and the Lawyer
Hovhannes Ishkhanyan
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
Armenia,
France
2023
105 minutes
Armenian
Subtitles: 
German Subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing, English

The film opens with the wedding of Garik and Hasmik and ends with a decorated tree for their son’s first Christmas in the new house that his father built himself. Between these fixed points of middle-class family life, nothing is as heteronormative as this bracket and above all the political and religious mainstream in Armenia would lead one to expect.

Hasmik is a lawyer who fights for LGBTQIA+ rights, her husband appears in the media as drag performer Carabina, does sex work and makes his life in a queer-phobic environment the subject of an autobiographical theatre performance. The film, which evolved out of close friendship and is always one step behind the wild energy of Garik/Carabina, takes a precarious, raw, but also utopian-tinted look at current social struggles. The longing for normality, emancipation and responsibility find themselves exposed – sometimes powerless and unprotected – to violent defamation. TV images show the zeal behind the attempted construction of homosexual and trans persons as “Un-Armenian.” Meanwhile Carabina, in a moment of rest from plastering the house, trowel in hand, plays a song by Charles Aznavour, whose family came from Armenia – “What Makes a Man?”

Jan Künemund

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Hovhannes Ishkhanyan
Cinematographer
Hovhannes Ishkhanyan
Editor
Wei-Yuan Song
Producer
Jean-Marie Gigon
Co-Producer
Hovhannes Ishkhanyan
Sound Design
Thomas Fourel
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Hasmik Petrosyan, Garik Amolikyan
Winner of: Silver Dove Feature-Length Film (International Competition Documentary Film)