A Story of People in War and Peace

By Scott Horton

In 1992, I visited a young man in Baku’s Bailovsky Prison. His name was Vardan Hovhannisyan and he was from the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh—a small patch of mountainous earth that had risen up in the waning days of the Soviet Union to seek its independence. Hovhannisyan’s activism had landed him in prison, and when I learned about his case, I sought him out and also raised his plight directly with Azerbaijan’s then-president, Ayaz Mutalibov. With time and support from the human rights community, Vardan won his freedom. He became a filmmaker, and he produced an amazing work entitled “A Story of People in War and Peace,” which tells the story of the struggle over Karabakh from the perspective of those most directly affected by it.

The film has been selected for the Tribeca Film Festival. Following the next showing, on Wednesday, May 2 at 6:30 (in the AMC Kips Bay Theater off 34th Street in Manhattan), I will be joining a question-and-answer session to discuss the film. See Information on tickets and the program.