Armenian filmmaker Jivan Avetisyan premiered his 4th feature film, “Revival,” on Saturday, October 3, at the Steven J. Ross Theater on the Warner Bros. Studios lot in Burbank, California. The Artsakh Arts and Cultural Foundation hosted the screening.
American actor Armand Assante and German actor Heino Ferch, who play the film’s central roles, attended. So did French-Armenian actor Robin Hairabian, who plays the lead, and French actress Clémence Baudouin. Assante is also an executive producer on the film, and his company, Assante & Bimonte Productions, is a production partner.
The film is set during the 2020 44-Day War, when Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, Syrian mercenaries and Israeli drones, attacked Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). More than 3,825 Armenians were martyred in the war.
Assante plays Jean Perbost, a robotics professor at the University of Marseille. Hairabian plays his student Murat Arakelian, who is building an AI called ORCHID that is about to land a major investment from the Rossun Corporation.
Murat drops the project to investigate his father’s death, which his mother had kept from him, and travels to Armenia just as the war and the pandemic break out. ORCHID becomes self-aware and uncovers Rossun’s role in war crimes, forcing Perbost to choose between the university’s reputation and the truth.
Romanian actress Maia Morgenstern plays Murat’s mother, Araksi Arakelian, and Armenian actor Babken Chobanyan also appears. The €1.2 million co-production between Armenia, Lithuania and Cyprus had support from the Cinema Foundation of Armenia, Armenia’s Ministry of Culture and Cyprus’s Deputy Ministry of Culture, plus crowdfunding.
Filming in Armenia took place in August and September 2023. Those were the final weeks of Azerbaijan’s 9-month blockade of Artsakh, which ended with the September 19 military assault and the ethnic cleansing of 120,000 Armenians.
Avetisyan’s earlier features, “Tevanik,” “The Last Inhabitant” and “Gate to Heaven,” were all filmed in Artsakh, which Azerbaijan has occupied since September 2023. “Revival” is the first of his films shot outside it.
After Los Angeles, the filmmakers are arranging special screenings in Armenian communities across the United States, and work on international distribution is ongoing. The film is set to open in Armenian theaters in March 2027.
