TV director: I did not go to the frontline, the frontline came to me (video)
“I did not go to the frontline, the frontline came to me,” says film director Nikolay Davtyan. Television director and real war… These two concepts with nothing in common interwove during the Artsakh war in 1991. Nikolay Davtyan began to document the war, when he was the general director of the Nagorno-Karabakh regional television. The frontline began to approach us slowly from afar, first from Shushi, then from d Malibeyli. We could not help filming it,” Mr Davtyan says. Before the explosion of the Artsakh TV building, Nikolay Davtyan and his teammates shot films about military operations along the Artsakh contact line every week. We went to Ali Bayramli. a squad was formed which went to the battlefield to remove the bodies of the deceased from the enemy’s territory. Together with Nalbandyan Gnel, we went after dead bodies,” Mr Davtyan recalls. Anahit Harutyunyan, a co-editor of the book “They were filming the war of 1991-1994,” says, “”we had brave filmmakers, cameramen and directors, who willingly, because no one had assigned or forced them to shoot those scenes, went to the battlefield, because they had a responsibility before their Motherland.” Almost everyone knows about the key events in the Artsakh war but few know the people who documented these events. Media representatives Anahit Harutyunyan and Ruzan Bagratunyan compiled evidence of the war scenes in the book. “We observed a common feature in them. All of them were modest: they did not talk about their work as if they had done something ordinary and it could not be otherwise. That very feature adorned them,” says Anahit Harutyunyan. Only fools are not afraid of bullets, she confesses. Wars also teach that one cannot escape the bullet meant for him, no matter what he does. Once I was scared to death when helicopter appeared from nowhere and began firing on us. I was looking for a huge stone to hide. Thanks God everything turned out well in the end,” Nikolay Davtyan recalls. He confesses that very often he moved around with a camera in one hand, and a gun – in the other. “I could not stay without a weapon, because our cameraman filmed everything and went in front of me and I was to protect him. I had a loaded gun in my hand all the time,” he says. The presentation of the book will be held on June 29.
