🎬 Citizens of Unreason #3: ‘We and our Mountains’ (1969)

‘Citizens of Unreason’ peers into the claustrophobic worlds of suspicion, censorship, and quiet revolt under the Soviet gaze, idem the fragile human logic that persists when reason itself is policed.

WE AND OUR MOUNTAINS
Henrik Malyan | 1969 | Soviet Union, Armenia | 94’ | EN subtitles

In We and our Mountains, director Henrik Malyan adapts a story by celebrated Armenian writer Hrant Matevosyan into a sharp and affectionate satire about power and community.

On a freezing night, the shepherd Ishkhan slaughters a stray sheep to feed his hungry companions. The next day, their neighbour Revaz appears, searching for his missing animal. Faced with the uncomfortable truth, the men admit they have eaten it and offer compensation. The matter might have ended there, were it not for the intervention of an ambitious young police lieutenant determined to launch an official investigation.  

Both comic and quietly subversive, the film captures the tensions between centre and periphery, state and individual, that ran throughout the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Widely regarded as the greatest Armenian film ever made.