Inner lines

In military parlance, inner lines are escape routes which, while being located close to enemy lines, escape control and allow for flight.
They are also, in this film, inner paths, those where our sorrows reside.

Around Mount Ararat, messengers and their carrier pigeons travel these parallel paths.

It is these inner lines that we follow today with them, meeting communities caught up in wars, in Turkey, Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.

This film is centered on Mount Ararat. In several countries and regions surrounding this mountain—Turkey, Kurdistan, Armenia, and Nagorno-Karabakh—wars and tensions have erupted in recent years, plunging certain communities into hardship. The Yazidis have been forced to flee the atrocities of ISIS in Iraqi Kurdistan, abandoning their homes to seek refuge in Turkey and Armenia, or have embarked on the perilous journey to Europe. Armenians remain in constant tension with Turkey, as the Armenian Genocide has never been recognized by the Ankara government. And just recently, a high-intensity war took place in Nagorno-Karabakh—an Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan—resulting in the deaths of more than six thousand Armenian soldiers, most of whom were barely eighteen years old.
For three years, we have been traversing these regions adjacent to Mount Ararat to meet and film men and women from these communities in peril who sometimes flee, resist, fight, try to save themselves.
Our documentary approach is primarily based on the human dimension. We do not seek to describe or geopolitically analyze the war situations we encounter. On the contrary, our approach consists of filming, as we travel around Mount Ararat, members of these diverse communities who, from one day to the next, have experienced war, hardship, and loss, and who are now forced to continue living, haunted by what they have seen and endured.