Milan-based artists Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi have been characterized as film archaeologists, seeking out cinema's origins and bringing them "to light" in their own exquisite assemblages. Their newest project was originally intended to be a documentary on Armenian history using footage which they planned to shoot. But upon realizing the power of existing images, they once again turned to scavenging film collections and archives. Beginning in 1987, they traveled to the Soviet republic of Armenia seeking traces of a history that has been characterized by deliberate, brutal erasures. They uncovered footage, some found in the archives of the Czar, of the massacre of Armenians in 1915, the advance of the Czarist army against the Turks in 1916, and the mass exodus from Armenia following that country's inclusion in the Soviet Union in 1918. Their work on the film coincided with the political upheaval in the Soviet Union, and the recent earthquake and pogrom in Armenia; the tragedy of the latter events overshadows the irony of the filmmakers' timing. In the closing images of the film, families flee Armenia on foot, a seeming continuation of the earlier footage of exodus. If the history of Armenia is presented as linear, it is a line etched deeply by invading armies and exiting populace. Its images comprise, in the words of the filmmakers, "a requiem for the tragedy of the century." --Kathy Geritz