Shoghakat Vardanyan

Although Shoghakat Vardanyan never studied filmmaking, her first film, the documentary 1489, won the Best Film Award and the FIPRESCI Prize at IDFA 2023 in the International Competition. She also won the Best Documentary Award at the Trieste Film Festival and other prizes at international festivals. She is also invited as a jury member for various festivals.

Shoghakat was born in 1993 into a family of artists in Yerevan. At the age of six, she decided to study music and become a pianist. She completed her studies at the Music School before continuing her training at the Komitas State Conservatory of Yerevan, earning a Bachelor’s degree in piano in 2014. She has performed classical, academic, contemporary, and experimental works, both as a soloist and as a member of chamber ensembles, as well as an accompanist, in Armenia, the United States, Canada, and Europe. Since 2017, she has been performing free improvisations and is a member of the Contemporary Sound Orchestra of Yerevan (Pots and Drums).
In September 2020, the war in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) broke out. When her family stopped receiving news from her younger brother, who was fighting on the front lines, she took her mobile phone and started filming. This led to the creation of her first film, 1489. For the editing-in-progress version of 1489, she received the Armenian Prime Minister’s Award (which she declined, believing that the film should have no political connection) in 2021, as well as the Grand Prize for Work in Progress at the Golden Apricot Film Festival in 2022.