Thanks to Christina Galstian, a dancer and choreographer hailing from Soviet Armenia, the company Yeraz (“dream”) was founded in the region of Paris. This company is a magnet for young people who all hold in their hearts something of the lost Armenia of their great grand-parents: cuisine and music, but also grief and anger. Through dance, a powerful exorcism, the company perpetuates an age-old tradition at the same time as it re-invents it. 

Between 2007 and 2015, the filmmaker Jacques Kébadian filmed these dozens of young people, girls and boys, hailing, as he does, from the Armenian diaspora. A few interviews were added to the many rehearsal and performance scenes (including a success at Olympia). Christina Galstian, whose exacting standards, inventiveness and sensitivity we measure, is the soul behind this artistic adventure. Through her work and enthusiasm, she has managed to draw out the best in each person and to ensure a formulation by dance of the surplus energy and emotion that these young people sometimes have problems expressing. From the collective trauma, shows are born that extol both the lost country and the dreams of today’s youth. In Beirut, the touring troupe walks the streets of the Armenian district to cheering crowds. After a new stage triumph, the dream ends (temporarily) with a wedding, no less choreographic, at the Armenian cathedral in Paris.

Source : Eva Ségal

Born in 1940 in Paris. Studies at IDHEC. Assistant director on three films by Robert Bresson. First film: Trotsky (1967). In 1968, he founded with Michel Andrieu and Renan Pollès the activist collective ARC, which produced Le Droit à la parole, Le Joli Mois de mai, CA13, Comité d'action du thirteenth.
The young people in Albertine (1972), the undocumented immigrants from D'une Brousse à l'autre (1997), the Zapatista Indians of La Fragile Armada (2003), the working class, the exiles: he stands alongside all the oppressed, however desperate and unequal the struggle.
Loyalty to Armenian origins, long-term collaborations with other creators (Jean-Robert Ipoustéguy, Pierre Guyotat, François-Marie Anthonioz, Patrick Bouchain, etc.), consistency of work with other filmmakers (Franssou Prenant, Serge Avedikian, Joani Hocquenghem …), diligence in building a gallery of portraits of exemplary women (Germaine Tillion, Geneviève de Gaulle, Chouchan Kebadian and her sisters, the Apsara dancers of Cambodia…).

(Source: Éditions Yellow Now)