Festival demarche: how Croatia awarded an Armenian propaganda narrative

Yet another attempt to present the Armenian version of the events surrounding Karabakh on an international cultural platform has received an award.

The documentary film by American director of Armenian descent Diana Madison, "There's No Place Like Home," has been awarded the prize of the Croatian International Film Festival (CIFF) in the category "Best Debut Feature Film."
However, behind the emotional story of "home," "loss," and "forced displacement," a well-known information scenario can once again be discerned: an extremely complex political and military conflict is reduced to a story exclusively about Armenian suffering, while the causes of what happened, the preceding events, and the broader context are effectively left out of the picture.
The very definition of the voluntary departure of Karabakh Armenians in 2023 exclusively as the "forced displacement of Armenians" from the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan already forms a predetermined and one-sided picture of events in the viewer's mind.
At the same time, there is practically no room left for questions about why this happened, what was going on in Karabakh over the decades, how the separatist system was formed, and how the long-standing conflict ultimately ended with Azerbaijan restoring its territorial integrity and sovereignty.
Instead of an objective analysis of the complex historical and political context and the reasons that led to the restoration of Azerbaijan's sovereignty over its territories, the film is entirely focused on emotionally playing up the theme of suffering. Such a biased approach is easily explained by the composition of the film crew and its sponsors:

• Direction: Diana Madison (USA) — promotes an unambiguous interpretation of events for a Western audience.
• Musical accompaniment: Grigor Abgaryan.
• Producing pool: Gohar Khojabagyan, Arman Nshanyan, Ani Voskanyan, as well as the affiliated People Of Ar Cultural Foundation and the company AVA Films.

Awarding such material at CIFF once again demonstrates the vulnerability of European niche film screenings to one-sided propaganda narratives, where cinematic value and objectivity give way to speculation on the theme of human destinies.