On the train from Moscow to Yerevan, Pelechian films men and women of different ages and ethnicities. A movie train, the length of a journey, with its fragments of bodies and lives caught in secret: faces, profiles, glances, laughters, slumbers… Images captured through the effects of light, shaped by the sound of the continuous rolling, shaken by the jolts of the train. All caught up in this journey, together in spite of themselves, any figure is diluted in its contemplation and turns to abstraction. A hymn to travel where the action is punctuated by the sound of the wagons on the rails. The details of this suspended time in the journey give shape to another Menq, an ephemeral community that sinks into the darkness. Made as the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, Pelechian considers Verj a companion film to Life, released a year later.

Pascale Paulat, “La Revue Documentaires”, n. 21, July 2007