Lernayin parek was my first film. I made it when I went back to my home town on vacation. The VGIK proposed that I do this project and they gave me a theme. In Armenia there’s this unusual job: people sit on the mountains and their duty is to see that rocks don’t fall onto the train tracks. They maintain the safe passage of the train. The film is about these people. I took this theme and translated it into my own visual language. I made a decision that if this film didn’t work, I wouldn’t continue at the institute. But it was a success. At the student festival I received a prize … The process of using recurring scenes was already there. The film both opens and closes with the same scene, showing mountain workers walking with lanterns against the sky. There is a gap between these scenes. Yet in this case, the gap (like the repetition of the image itself) does not create distance; rather, it produces a sense of return, bringing the film back to its initial mood and giving rise to a lyrical ending.

Artavazd Pelechian, interviewed by Scott MacDonald in A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, University of California Press, Berkeley 1998