Day: March 11, 2024
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NPR News: 03-11-2024 5PM EDT
“The Last Repair Shop,” a documentary film that features Steve Bagmanyan, who faced ethnic persecution in Azerbaijan in the 1980s, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film on Sunday.
The film is directed by Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers and produced by Los Angeles Times Film Studio.
The film tells the story of four devoted craftspeople who help keep over 80,000 student musical instruments in good repair for the Los Angeles Unified School District. The film blends the unexpectedly intimate personal histories of the repair people with emotional, firsthand accounts from the actual student musicians for whom their instruments made all the difference.
Steve Bagmanyan is seen working in the repair shop
Bagmanyan is the general manager of the repair shop. Alongside Bagmanyan, the film introduces a technician from each department: Dana Atkinson, in the strings division, who takes us to his personal breaking point as a young man confronting his sexuality; Paty Moreno, in charge of brass and the sole woman in the shop, who chronicles her pursuit of the American dream as a Mexican immigrant and single mother; Duane Michaels, a quirky, self-described hillbilly who fixes the woodwind instruments and shares the rip-roaring tale of how his $20 fiddle took him on tour with Elvis; and finally Steve himself, who learned to tune pianos in America after surviving a harrowing escape from ethnic persecution in Azerbaijan in the late 1980s, a conflict again in the headlines today.
“The Last Repair Shop” is currently streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.
YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am)—Just days after the latest round of talks on delimiting the Armenian-Azerbaijani borer, Azerbaijan demanded at the weekend that Armenia immediately and unconditionally withdraw from four border villages.
The office of Deputy Prime Minister Shahin Mustafayev, who led the Azerbaijani delegation in Thursday’s talks, said that “there is no doubt about their belonging to Azerbaijan.”
The ruined villages are among eight border areas, most of them enclaves inside Armenia, which were controlled by Azerbaijan in Soviet times and occupied by the Armenian army in the early 1990s. For its part, the Azerbaijani side seized at the time a bigger Armenian enclave as well as large swathes of agricultural land belonging to this and several other border communities of Armenia. It occupied more Armenian territory during border clashes in 2021 and 2022.
The Armenian government says that a total of 200 square kilometers of Armenia’s internationally recognized territory adjacent to 31 Armenian communities is now controlled by Azerbaijan. It says that it is ready, in principle, to consider swapping the formerly Azerbaijani enclaves for those lands or seek other compromise solutions.
Reaffirming Baku’s position on the issue, Mustafayev’s office claimed that Azerbaijan never occupied any Armenian territory. It said that the “immediate liberation” of the four villages must take place before the two sides start delimiting and demarcating their border. The delimitation process must result in Armenian withdrawal from the four other contested areas, it said.
The Armenian government did not comment on the demand as of Monday evening. The office of Mustafayev’s Armenian counterpart, Mher Grigoryan, was in no rush to reply to a written question from RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Vagharshak Hakobyan, a pro-government parliamentarian, urged reporters to keep waiting for an official reaction. He also said vaguely that border talks between countries around the world typically result in mutual territorial concessions.
Opposition lawmakers were concerned about the development. One of them, Gegham Manukyan, said that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s ambiguous position and statements on the issue could be used by Azerbaijan for legitimizing a “new aggression” against Armenia.
Yerevan insists on using the most recent Soviet military maps to ascertain the long border between the two South Caucasus countries. Baku rejects the idea backed by the European Union.
The lingering border disputes are a key hurdle to the signing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty. In an interview with Turkish state television broadcast late last week, Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan complained that Baku now does not want the treaty to make any reference to the 1991 Almaty declaration by newly independent ex-Soviet republics that certified their Soviet-era borders.
Former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev paid millions of dollars for a fawning documentary about his life and career, an investigation shows. Produced by pro-Kremlin U.S. filmmaker Igor Lopatonok in 2021, the miniseries featured an interview with Nazarbaev conducted by controversial U.S. film director Oliver Stone. Lopatonok is reported to also have approached other authoritarian leaders — including Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev and Belarus’s Alyaksandr Lukashenka — with similar film proposals.