Calendar

A film set in Armenia and in Canada. A photographer goes to Armenia. His job is set: he will photograph twelve churches for a calendar. His wife is with him. She speaks Armenian and translates. A driver is hired as well. He is local; he knows the churches and tells the history of each. From there the film runs in three times at once. The first is Armenia. They travel from church to church, photographs are taken, and the woman talks to the driver. The photographer is always behind the camera. His face is never seen and he does not join the conversation. The second is a flat. The man is in Canada, sitting at his table, having dinner each evening with a woman; the women are different each time and each at some point picks up the telephone and speaks in another language. The third is an answering machine. Messages from his wife have accumulated and he listens to them again and again. What the narrative is interested in is not divorce but the one who looks: the photographer sees everything through a frame, and that is exactly why he loses his wife. The woman leaves the frame by degrees. The narrative does not stage it; she drifts to the edge of the shot, then is not visible, and in the end does not return. The production is very small. The film was shot in a week, with very little money and a handful of people. The director plays the photographer himself. His wife at the time plays the woman. The running time is a little over sixty minutes. Arsinée Khanjian, Ashot Adamyan and Atom Egoyan are in the cast. Atom Egoyan wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes formal experiment and films built on identity. Who it is not for: anyone looking for narrative; the film rests almost entirely on repetition and there is next to no incident.