The Fondation Cartier is pleased to announce the European festival premiere of Nature, the new lm by legendary Armenian lmmaker Artavazd Pelechian at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (November 17 – 28th, 2021).

Commissioned in 2005 by Fondation Cartier and ZKM Filminstitut in Karlsruhe, Nature is the culmination of 15 years of work and the director’s rst feature lm in nearly 30 years. Comprised of a montage of found disaster footage, the lm marks a return to one of Pelechian’s favorite themes – humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

Images in Nature were taken from archives, reworked (slowed, reframed, inverted) and edited together to produce veritable visual poems that escape the classical distinction between ction and documentary. “I am convinced that cinema can convey certain things that no language in the world can translate. For me, it goes back to the Tower of Babel, to before the division into di erent languages,” says Pelechian.

A dedicated website conceived for the exhibition of Artavazd Pelechian at the Fondation Cartier (2020-2021) and Encounter with Artavazd Pelechian is the fruit of an ambitious research e ort conducted in close collaboration with the artist. It explores Pelechian’s history with rare documents, historical photos and a number of contributions by major gures from the art and lm worlds, including lmmakers Atom Egoyan, Andrei Ujică and Pietro Marcello.

Artavazd Pelechian’s Nature (2020) was produced by Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and ZKM Filminstitut with support from the Folk Arts Hub Foundation. It will be screened on Friday, November 19, at 5:30 pm in the Tuschinski Theatre, on Sunday the 21st at 10:00 am and Friday the 26th at 03:00 pm in the Eye Filmmuseum as well as on the 24th of November at 09:30 pm at Rialto de Pijp. Further ticket information can be found here.

On the occasion of his new lm, IDFA will award Pelechian with the Lifetime Achievement Award and screen three treasures from his oeuvre, introducing a new generation to his unparalleled work. One of the auteur’s earliest lms, We, rousingly honors the people of Armenia and their tumultuous history, marking the birth of the lmmaker’s signature distance montage technique. In Seasons of the Year, the director orchestrates a magni cent yet bittersweet symphony of human existence centering on an isolated community in the remote Armenian mountaintops. Finally, in Our Century, Pelechian turns to the 20th century space race of the U.S. and U.S.S.R., capturing the terri c nature of humanity crossing a cosmic threshold.