In 1977, Armenfilm released Henrik Malyan’s Nahapet, the first epic adaptation of the tragic history of the Armenian nation, based on Hrachya Kochar’s story about a Genocide survivor. I was eight at the time, but already knew of the Ottoman massacres from my survivor grandparents. Our generation lived on two planes – in the brightness of childhood, and in the whispering echoes of the damage of a historical trauma.
The quasi-epic hero Nahapet walks along an endless, rocky road towards the audience. Nahapet, which means ‘forefather of a nation’, has left the Western Armenian village where his wife and children were slain by the Turks before his eyes in 1915. He is silent, seemingly never to speak again. He walks on, but is no longer alive; he has nothing left, no present or future. But step by step his personal story develops into a summary of the nation’s history. As critic Semyon Freilikh wrote, “Nahapet is a generalized archetype, who comes from the remote past and goes into the future”.
Nahapet is a fighter who never gives up. An apple tree on the lakeshore, with countless red fruits rolling down towards the blue water, is how Malyan, the ‘lyricist’ of Armenian cinema, pictures the huge loss sustained by his nation. Yet like all true metaphors, this image is multi-semantic and means not only loss but continuation, the prospect of reaching the shore one day. The camera conveys not so much physical reality as some spiritual plane, and the apples seem unreal, as if handmade. This and other breathtaking scenes are rendered in an intense color palette – a tragic story told amid an alarmingly unnatural rave of tonalities. Placed within the same poetic conventionality is the hero’s strong and happy family, “crowned with an apple tree and dressed in attires as tender and bright as the wings of a butterfly”, wrote “Cahiers du cinéma” in 1986.
The film has many meanings, cinematically conveying both ‘happiness’ and ‘loss’, an attempt to touch both ends of human existence. Thus, ‘salvation’ and ‘revival’ of the apple tree symbolize the rebirth of a massacred nation.

Siranush Galstyan