caucasus

Built in the XIV-XVIII century… beautiful, but rather difficult to reach… there are still bones and whole skeletons inside those building.

It takes about half an hour by mini-bus to get from Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia, to Nazran, Ingushetia. In spite of these, residents of one city apparently scarcely visit the other. Anyway, this is a long story, and I’m not going into that… The first thing one notices approaching Ingushetia is the extremely visible presence of military units. Check points at the border between the two republics. Soldiers with automatic gun machines all along the main road, all in camouflage uniforms with heavy bullet-proof vests, some even with their faced covered with balaclavas.

“Journey to Armenia” is a film documentary project I’ve been working on together with Andrea Rossini and other colleagues at OBCT between 2009 and 2013. It develops around the journey of Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam in the Caucasus in 1930 (at the basis of Osip’s “Journey to Armenia”) and more in general around the life of the Mandelstams. At the same time, it is also a journey from Abkhazia to Nagorno Karabakh across today’s Caucasus.

Youth in the Northern Caucasus: associationism, identity, and patriotism in a complex, multi-ethnic context.