Almost fifty years
ago, Frunze Dovlatyan’s film, “Hello, It’s Me!” (Բարեւ, ես եմ), marked a
milestone in the history of Armenian cinema.
Dovlatyan was born
in Kamo (nowadays Gavar), on May 27, 1927, in a family of actors. His
father and his paternal aunt staged amateur plays in the theater of the
town. When the Dovlatyan family moved to Yerevan, Frunze, still a school
student, started his career as an actor. He performed from 1941-1952 in
the provincial theaters of Armenia and in the “Gabriel Sundukian”
academic theater of Yerevan. He graduated in 1947 from the theatrical
studio of the latter, and appeared in a few films from 1943-1958, the
first being Hamo-Bek Nazarian’s “David Bek”.
He moved to Moscow
and graduated from the all-Soviet Cinema Institute (VGIK) in 1959. He
had already started his career as a film director (he would still appear
as an actor in several films, some of them of his own, until the late
1980s) and directed three movies from 1958-1963 in Moscow.
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| Soviet movie poster for Hello, It's Me. |
He returned to
Armenia in 1964 and the next year directed his first film in the
homeland, “Hello, It’s Me,” partly based on the life of the famous
Armenian physicist Artem Alikhanian, the founder of the Institute of
Physics of Yerevan. The film started the career of famous actor Armen
Djigarkhanian and had ten million viewers in 1966. It was nominated to
the Palme d’Or in the Festival of Cannes in the same year and won the
State Prize of Armenia in 1967.
From 1966-1969
Dovlatyan was first secretary of the Union of Cinematographers of
Armenia. He went on to direct some important films of the last decades
of Soviet Armenian cinema: “Saroyan Brothers” (1968), “Chronicle of
Yerevan Days” (1972), “Live Long” (1979), “The Solitary Walnut Tree”
(1986). From 1986 he was the artistic director of the Armenfilm studios.
His last work was “Yearning” (1990), about the life of a genocide
survivor who, led by his yearning of the lost homeland, crosses the
Soviet-Turkish border during the time of Stalin.
The filmmaker was
the chairman of the Tekeyan Cultural Association in Armenia during the
last three years of his life. He passed away in 1997 and was buried in
Yerevan.
