Natalie D.C.
Thoughtful and oh-so-important, There Was, There Was Not (2024) is a documentary that begins as a character study on the daily lives of four Artsakh-born women and ends as a meditation on the various shapes of women’s resistance, the human toll of war, and the role of storytelling in the face of a world-shattering event.
Ahead of the film’s limited theatrical run, American-Armenian filmmaker Emily Mkrtichian spoke with Film Obsessive Staff Writer Natalie D.C.—wearing matching keffiyahs, no less!—to discuss the highs and lows behind the making of her groundbreaking directorial debut.
What inspired There Was, There Was Not and, before the war, what was its original trajectory?
I started making the feature in 2016, and it came on the heels of a short that I made, which was about the first group of women who were trained to remove landmines from a war in the 1990s. When I first went into that film, I was interested in a pretty basic idea of feminism, and after I embedded with this team of women, I very quickly started to understand that it was a much more complicated picture of what strength and resilience looked like in a place that had experienced real conflict.
All of the women were single mothers, they had all taken this dangerous work to care for their families and their communities, and that really stuck with me, and so I decided that I really wanted to expand the lens a little bit and understand the role of women in post-conflict regions a little bit more deeply. So, I, through various means, ended up following four different women who were, at the time I started filming, each in a different generation—20s, 30s, 40s, 50s—and they all had very different kinds of work. But they all had a really deep love for and commitment to this place where they lived, despite the obvious difficulties of living there as women.
Originally, the film was an observational meditation on them and their lives, and it involved a large-scale art project of creating portraits of them as they saw themselves. But then, when I went back in 2020 and was filming what I thought was the ending of the documentary, that’s when the war broke out, and I just happened to be there with a camera, and everything changed from there.
How did you come to meet the four women of There Was, There Was Not?
I met Sveta through making that short film, because she worked at the Halo Trust as a landmine remover. Siranush and Gayane, I met through different mutual friends who lived in Armenia and who I had conversations with and they were like, “Oh, you’re spending all this time in Artsakh, you should really meet Siranush, you should really meet Gayane, they’re doing this really incredible work.”
And then, Sosé: I was teaching a filmmaking workshop in the capitol for high school kids (mostly a large group of girls) and they wanted to make a film about Sosé. They were like, “There’s this young girl, and she’s a judo champion, she wants to go to the Olympics, she’s so cool, and we follow her on Instagram.” From the minute I met Sosé, it was obvious that she should be in a film. We just really bonded, Sosé and I, and became friends really quickly.
The idea of a “fairytale” is an integral framing device within this documentary’s story. Was this always the case or did the title and its meaning come to you later?
For me, the question was, “What are the stories that we’re telling in resistance [versus] the story that’s being told about us?” So, originally, that was happening on a smaller scale with each woman, and I was trying to use film and cinema to prioritize their version of the story over the one that was consistently being told about them and their worth.That, of course, made me think about this traditional beginning of Armenian tales, which is “there was, there was not” [or] “Լինում է, չի լինում.” What are the stories that we tell, and what work can they do?
Once the war broke out, there was a period of time where it felt like this kind of reliance on fairy tales and myth and storytelling—there was a moment where I lost faith in it, where it felt like the real world is so hard, how could we even talk about stories at a time like this? Which was a crisis with the film as well. I filmed so many things that I never intended to, and never would have chose to, and I didn’t know if it was ethical to even make a film about something like this. I was really struggling for a long time with how to represent this kind of a story.
In the end, the title really brought me back to this kind of conviction that the stories that we choose to tell about ourselves can be in opposition to the story that is being told about us. With this film, I think a lot about the story that was told about this conflict in the international media and press: nothing, or a blip, or a place that’s always been in conflict, and therefore, of course, there was another conflict. As opposed to my relationship to this place being there for nearly 10 years, having close relationships with people there, and being able to document the reality of their lives and their stories, and what it felt to experience both a beautiful connection to a very specific place and a rupture that displaced them from that place.
What was it like filming in Artsakh during the war?
It happened unexpectedly. It felt like it happened to some of my closest friends at the time. It was like watching something terrible happen to them, and I think that’s the lens that I experienced it through. I did not have any formal training in conflict coverage or journalism. It’s its own world that people are trained for years to actually, like, cover safely. So, there was a really steep learning curve for me, in terms of how to exist in those spaces and continue this kind of work.
There were hundreds of journalists that showed up to this place that they had never heard about, overnight, and we were all kind of staying in the same quarters, and it became clear really quickly that their job was to be there for 2 or 3 days, understand as much as possible, get images of the bombs going off and the destruction, and then leave and file a story. As I watched that, you can see the mechanism of storytelling, of how the narrative gets created, of what’s happening here. And it was so surface level, and they were all interested in the same things: violence, destruction, explosions, frontline, soldiers. For me, that was really helpful in clarifying, okay, someone’s got that. That’s not my work. That’s not what I’m here to do.
I’m here to be with these four women who I’ve created these really deep relationships with and witness what it’s actually like for them, emotionally, to experience something like this, and support in any way that I can. It was very clear to me—and I think that that translates into the film—that my job was not to document war, but it was to document people. When you watch the film, what I hoped for in making the film is that you don’t experience it as a film about war. You experience it as a film about these four women, and that was deeply important to me.
What was it like wearing so many different hats (director, producer, director of photography) during production?
It was the way that this story had to be told. For the first year, I worked with a cinematographer, and it became clear really quickly that, because so much of what was important to me was a relationship, having other people in the room actually didn’t add much [to] the way I wanted to tell the story. Picking up the camera myself and being the only person in the room with these women really made it much more intimate, and it just gave me, as a director, an immediacy with the cinematic language, because the camera became an extension of my way of seeing. When I would watch back footage that I had shot, I could feel the way that I felt about the women through the footage, and that was really important to me. The actual intimacy in a space and having it be just me, and also the way that the camera was capturing images and translating my way of looking—those were both really important for me. My version of directing in this nonfiction context was by holding the camera, by creating frames, by letting things unfold in really particular ways in front of me. It was a sharing of a relationship.
As far as, like, the producing part goes, it’s just, you know, like, I know that place and those people better than any professional producer who came onto the project could have. I would be spending months in this place, and I would wake up, and I’d call Sosé, and I’d say, “What are you up to today? Can we hang out?” And she would be like, “I don’t know, come by.” We’d jump in a car, and I would have no idea where we were going, and we would end up on the top of a mountain. There was a spontaneity and relational nature to the planning of what I would capture with a camera that just lent itself to me being the person in charge.
I should make clear that when we got to post-production, I would have actually died without a producer (laughs).
What was the biggest challenge you had to face during the making of There Was, There Was Not? What was your biggest triumph?
The biggest challenge of this film, in the edit, is that it started as one thing and it became something totally different. The traditional storytelling rules are: give us a premise in the beginning and follow through on it by the end. But, in this particular instance, everything that all four of these characters were working towards was completely demolished. There was nothing to show for it, and so that had to kind of become the guiding narrative thread. The film pretty clearly has a before, during, and after a conflict that became a bit of a structure as we were trying to map out the edit of the film.
One of the triumphs that I’m very proud of is that myself and the editor, Alexandria Bombach, really committed to allowing the before—the first part of the film—[to] take up time and space, despite the fact that it didn’t have a technical payoff at the end. So many people told me in the editing of this film, “We should be in the conflict, the war should start 10–15 minutes in.” It felt like such an injustice, like, if I did that, then the entire engine of conflict, the entire thing moving the film forward would be war, and that’s not what I wanted. Being able to spend the first half of the film in this really beautiful, yet complicated life with these four women was a huge triumph.
Why do you believe this documentary deserves to be seen, especially in 2025?
What happened in Artsakh wasn’t the beginning, but it was a particular type of conflict in terms of technology and international rhetoric. Today, as we are watching across this same region, this kind of genocidal intent, this mass displacement, this flattening of the actual complexity of a conflict by the international media, this story, which really focuses on the real, lived lives of people in this place, and what it’s like to lose something like this, just resonates with a lot of stuff that we are being forced to watch today, and feel really helpless in the midst of. I felt so helpless during that conflict, and today I feel the same way. The only way that I had to deal with that in the context of the Artsakh war was to be present, to witness, and to tell a story about it.
Lastly, if audiences could take only one lesson away from There Was, There Was Not, what should it be?
I did not make this film for people to watch and feel bad for these four women. It’s not a film that’s asking for sympathy; it’s offering a model of how to live in the face of complete rupture and horrific conflict that could touch any one of us these days. It’s really a lesson in strength, resilience, and stubborn insistence on dignity and life in the face of the unimaginable. What I would really love for people to take away is these women experience so much, but they wake up every morning, and they keep working towards a better future, and if they can do it, I can do it.
