The Armenian diaspora, cinema and false narratives of the past

A film about the events of 2023 — when Armenians who had lived in Karabakh during the years of its occupation began leaving Khankendi and the surrounding territories en masse, unwilling to accept Azerbaijan’s restored sovereignty — has been given an award in Croatia. Official Yerevan said nothing about this “cinematic success,” and that is the most interesting thing about the story.

The prize was awarded at a festival in Šibenik, on the Dalmatian coast, in the Best First Feature category.

The Croatian International Film Festival was held for the third time this year, from 24 to 27 July; entries were submitted through the FilmFreeway platform. The festival opened with the 2024 American picture “The Friend,” starring Bill Murray and Naomi Watts.

The award-winning film is called “There’s No Place Like Home” and is devoted, as noted above, to the departure of the Armenian population from Azerbaijan’s Karabakh region in the autumn of 2023.

Its author is Diana Madison, and she is not from the Republic of Armenia. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, in the neighbourhood known as Little Armenia; her parents arrived from the Soviet Union at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s with refugee status.

She began her career as an intern at Entertainment Tonight, then launched the YouTube channel Hollyscoop, which became a reasonably popular entertainment channel, and later sold her digital studio.

She was an executive producer of the show Glam Masters for the Lifetime network — together with Kim Kardashian; she subsequently founded a cosmetics brand that is sold at Neiman Marcus and Bloomingdale’s. She had never made a documentary before this project.

The best account of why the film was made comes from its own creators. In September 2024 the Los Angeles publication Armenian Weekly ran an interview with the crew. Madison explained the idea by claiming that Armenian stories are supposedly manipulated by “propaganda and oil money,” and set out the plan: to use industry connections, begin with the festival circuit — and go on from there to the Oscar race. At that point the project was described as a forty-minute film. In Šibenik, however, it received its prize as a first feature.

Yerevan, this time, kept a meaningful silence

It should be noted separately that there is no sign of Armenian state involvement in this project. The film does not appear among the works financed by Armenia’s National Cinema Centre. There have so far been no screenings held with the participation of Armenian diplomatic missions. Neither the Foreign Ministry nor the Ministry of Culture responded to the award. Official Yerevan simply did not notice this victory — and that, unlike the prize itself, calls for an explanation.

In our view, such an explanation exists. For several years now the Armenian state and the organised Armenian diaspora have been locked in a dispute whose subject is the peace process between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Following the Washington summit of August 2025, at which the peace agreement was initialled, the Armenian National Committee of America held a briefing in Congress entitled “Peace Without Justice in the South Caucasus.”

What had been achieved there was described not as a path to peace but as a “scheme for the destruction of the Armenian state.” The lifting by the US administration of the Section 907 restrictions, which opened the way to military cooperation with Azerbaijan, was characterised by the ANCA as nothing less than a “reckless step.”

Yerevan answers no less directly. On 17 June 2026, speaking in parliament, Nikol Pashinyan laid responsibility for the “renewed demands” of the Azerbaijani side on the Armenian opposition and on diaspora structures: in his words, Baku’s rhetoric about “Western Azerbaijan” is a response to campaigns in defence of the rights of displaced Karabakh Armenians.

The shift in priorities has touched an older subject as well. In October 2024 Armenia’s Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan stated that international recognition of the events of 1915 had ceased to be priority number one; the priorities named were peace, stability and the normalisation of relations with neighbours.

In June 2026, when the Israeli government approved a bill recognising those events as a so-called “genocide,” Yerevan said nothing for several days, after which Pashinyan announced that he did not consider a response necessary: refraining from turning the subject into a political instrument was, he said, in the interests of the Republic of Armenia.

For structures that had spent three decades building their work around recognition campaigns, this sounded like a repudiation of the common cause.

The divergence also has a measurable basis. The political capital of the largest diaspora organisations accumulated around an unresolved conflict: resolutions, lobbying campaigns, fundraising. A settlement not only contradicts their convictions but also devalues an asset that took thirty years to build. This is not merely a matter of coordination or intent — it is a matter of an environment in which a particular frame reproduces itself. A private debut film by a Los Angeles entrepreneur and a briefing on Capitol Hill move in the same direction, even though there appears to be no organisational connection between them.

“Armenian style” balance (the kind that suits Europe)

It is worth noting here that over three years various documentary showcases have awarded prizes to an entire group of films about one — the Armenian — side of the Karabakh conflict.

“1489” by Shoghakat Vardanyan took the main prize of the international competition at Amsterdam’s IDFA along with the FIPRESCI award. “My Sweet Land” by Sareen Hairabedian won the Grand Jury Award in the first-feature competition at the Sheffield documentary festival. “There Was, There Was Not” by Emily Mkrtichian received the audience award and an honourable mention from the jury at Mar del Plata, as well as the FIPRESCI prize at Yerevan’s Golden Apricot. “Aurora’s Sunrise” by Inna Sahakyan travelled to Annecy, Amsterdam, Lisbon and Hamburg and was submitted by Armenia for the Oscars.

Accounts of the other side of the same conflict are absent from these lists — films from Azerbaijan frequently fail to pass the censorship of these festivals’ organisers, while Armenian filmmakers themselves, naturally enough, ignore the thirty-year history of the suffering of Azerbaijani internally displaced persons.

Here it is worth asking a question that the makers of such films do not ask themselves. All the works listed above were made between 2023 and 2025 — at a moment when the story “of losing one’s home” became both possible and in demand. But the people who lost their homes in that same Karabakh and in those same surrounding districts did not appear in 2023.

Hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis were driven out of those lands and out of Armenia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many spent three decades in railway carriages, dormitories, unfinished sanatoriums and tent camps, far from places to which most of them never returned.

In thirty years not one of these people has become — even in passing, even for the sake of that balance Europeans profess to love so dearly — one of the protagonists of a documentary made with Armenian money and decorated with a prize in Amsterdam, Sheffield or Mar del Plata. Their stories exist. They have been gathered, documented, made available. They were simply of no use to those who today explain to international audiences what “the loss of home” means.

The proposition that “home” is a universal concept and that its loss is a shared human tragedy is voiced constantly in these films. It is true. Testing it is not difficult: it is enough to apply it to those who lost their homes earlier.

A few words about the events of 2023

The departure of 2023 is presented in the film as forced displacement. Official Baku rightly characterises it differently — as a voluntary departure against the background of an announced programme of reintegration and amnesty, given that residents were offered the chance to remain and take Azerbaijani citizenship. And there are thousands of confirmations of this — photographs, video materials, documented comments by Karabakh Armenians themselves and by experts.

What is also missing from the film is the history that preceded this “exodus”: the people who left Karabakh in the autumn of 2023 drove out in their own cars, along a road that was under observation, with their belongings, over the course of several days. Whereas the Azerbaijanis expelled from the same places thirty years earlier left otherwise — under gunfire, barefoot, across the cold snow, with children and possessions in their arms. The picture does not touch on this part of the story — just as it does not touch on the question of where the situation that became its finale came from in the first place.

This is precisely where the boundary runs between testimony and construction. Testimony is limited by what the witness saw. Construction is defined by what has been kept out of frame.

Postscript: ‘one-sided’ Šibenik and Croatia’s own history

There is a dimension to the choice of venue that its organisers most likely did not consider.

Croatia is a country that went through a war of its own, where each side possesses a complete and internally consistent account of what happened, and where population displacement ran in both directions. What a one-sided account of a conflict looks like was learned here not from books but from experience.

The prize in the category for debut filmmakers was nevertheless awarded for precisely such a one-sided account.

What follows from this

Azerbaijan has its own history of these same places. Hundreds of thousands of people who left Karabakh and Armenia at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, three decades in temporary housing, a generation that grew up away from its native places. That history has been gathered and documented; it has been spoken of and continues to be spoken of — from the rostrums of international organisations and on diplomatic platforms, in books, in exhibitions, in documentary and feature film.

Nor should anyone be surprised that this work continues. For as long as the Armenian side — whether official bodies or the diaspora, which makes no difference — goes on disseminating distorted narratives of the past, a corresponding response is warranted.

Armenian readers, however, would do well to take note of something else. Films of the kind honoured in Šibenik are turned towards the past and change the position of not one of those who left Karabakh in 2023. Their position can be changed only by a durable peace — with open borders, functioning routes and predictable neighbours.

The peace process is an agreement between two states, and Armenia has no less of an interest in it than Azerbaijan. That a part of the organised diaspora is working against this course is something the Armenian prime minister says himself. How Yerevan resolves this contradiction is a question on which considerably more depends than on the distribution of prizes at film festivals.