“Jagadakeer” is an Armenian term meaning fate, destiny or, literally, “what is written on the forehead.” Filmmaker Tina Bastijian’s fate was to find in film a space in which to explore issues of memory, erasure, nostalgia, absence and reconnection, using the Armenian genocide as point of departure. A collage of stylized tableaus, found footage and home movies, this personal meditation is not just about her grandmother, great-aunts or the Turks; it is the filmmaker's attempt to articulate 'the catastrophe' into film language--to position the real and the imagined, the heard and unheard, the longed-for and the denied.
JAGADAKEER ... between the near & east
2001 | 19 minutes | color/bl+wh | sound
In English, Armenian, Turkish and Arabic with English Subtitles.
re/turn
"A poignant and elegiac film poem… " (2001- Mark Fox, SF Int’l Film Festival program notes)

Selected Screenings and Awards

-The San Francisco International Film Festival-Certificate of Merit/First Person Documentary, 2001
-Utopiana Project (Migration des Images) a collaboration with Centre pour l'Image , Contemporaine de Geneve and the Cinemathque Armenienne, Yerevan , 2002
-Women In The Director’s Chair Film Festival, Chicago 2002
-The First World Congress of Middle Eastern Studies Film Festival, Mainz, Germany, 2002
-Inheritance: Art and Images Beyond a Silenced Genocide, Beacon Street Gallery, Chicago, 2002
-Black Maria Film/Video Festival and tour-Juror’s Citation Award, 2002
-The Denver International Film Festival 2001
-The Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley 2002
-The Blinding Light Cinema, Vancouver, 2003
-Retrospective of Armenian Cinema at the Beirut International Film Festival, 2001
Havana Biennale, 2003
distribution:
-V-Tape (Toronto)

-Third World Newsreel (NYC)
Selected Collections include:
Columbia University, (NY); UCLA, (CA); Stanford University, (CA)
" In Jagadakeer...between the near & east, we hear many sounds--a film projector, traffic, circadas, static. Early in the film, an image of hands opening a pomegranate is synched to the sound of an old-fashioned flash bulb popping... There is also the sound of impedance feedback ... The sound documents memory's mediators (photo, film, radio), reminding us that memory is constantly made and unmade by mediation."
[Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity. Anahid Kassabian. University of California
Press,2013]