FILMS

Official Competition at IDFA (International Documentary Festival Amsterdam), 2012
National Film Board of Canada Best Short Documentary, 2012
Golden Sheaf Award for Best Documentary, Yorkton International Film Festival
Best Documentary, Reel World Film Festival
Audience Award, Dawson International Short Film Festival
Best Documentary, New York International Film & Video Festiva

"A sensitive and important record of a unique place and the powerful history it contains."
Atom Egoyan

“...a beautifully crafted film that brilliantly weaves the many layers ... from memory and history to the present and reality; in impressionistic lyricism… it is a personal and a political documentary that should be seen by anyone interested in the consequences of ethnic violence.”
Marc Glassman

On the Damascus Road in Lebanon’s beautiful Bekaa Valley, an Armenian man with late-stage Parkinson’s takes one last journey.

This impressionistic film is a journey into the mind and life of a man with a crippling disease. In addition to the tremors and shakes, Barkev suffers from the lesser known ‘monster’ of Parkinson’s, the relentless hallucinations that swing him back and forth between time and space.

23 KILOMETRES

ANJAR: FLOWERS, GOATS AND HEROES

A journey into the unexplored sexual world of the veiled women of Damascus Syria as they shop for lingerie in a public market.

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES Production Manager
(2006)

Feature documentary exploring the narrative line found within the photography of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky

A machine maker and an amateur cosmologist, Barkev can no longer speak. Yet through his journals, his machines, and powerful imagery with music, the film travels both physically and metaphorically into the past and the future of both the man and his country Lebanon, a country debilitated by sectarian division, not unlike Barkev’s diseased body, left a shell of its former self, dwelling on the past, unable to imagine its own future.

CODE GREEN Director, Ontario episodes
(2006) TV half hour x 3 eps, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the world’s first environmental home-makeover challenge TV series.

HEROES of THE MOUNTAIN Writer, Director, Producer
(2004)

Choreographed to stunning original music recordings, HEROES OF THE MOUNTAIN is a 19-minute photo-essay. A photographic montage of over 500 stills, portraits, archival photographs, CGI images and digital video images choreographed to breathtaking musical movements that tells one hundred years of the history of the heroic people of Musa Dagh.

DREAMS OF EDUCATION Writer, Director
(2003)
Commissioned by The National Film Board of Canada.

A documentary about the challenges high school students face in their pursuit for higher education.

SAAREN FILMS

In 1979, at the peak of the Lebanese Civil War, a young Armenian girl’s life in a small village becomes forever linked to a group of 1915 genocide survivors.

SEX + RELIGION Writer, Director- one episode
(2010) TV half hour, Vision television

Commissioned by Vision Television in Ontario, a 13xhalf-hour series about how sex and religion co-exist and how sex fits into the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment.

TELEVISION & SHORTS

VEILS UNCOVERED

THE HEROES OF MUSA DAGH Writer, Director, Producer
(2006) TV hour, OMNI television

Commissioned by OMNI Television. A Television one-hour documentary in Armenian language about the history of the Musa Dagh people.

SAAREN FILMS

Docudays Film Festival, Beirut Lebanon
AFMA Film festival, LA, USA
ARPA Festival, CA, USA
MESA Film Festival, Arizona, USA
MED Film Festival, Rome, Italy

Official Competition Karlovy Vary IFF 2015, Czech Republic
Official Competition Dubai International Film Festival 2015, UAE
Official Selection Munich International Film Festival 2016, Germany