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The Lighthouse (Mayak)

A film by Maria Sakyaan
Armenia 2007

Maria Saakyan's elegiac, semi-autobiographical slice-of-life drama The Lighthouse unfolds against the backdrop of the Caucasus wars that plagued Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan in the early 1990s.

As the scope of this mass-scaled conflict extends itself to one woman's small village, she is forced to drop everything, move to Moscow, and start over from scratch - thus bidding farewell to her hometown and way of life, perhaps indefinitely.

Maria Sakyaan's The Lighthouse (Mayak) added to Second Run's Coming Soon page.

A small picture of what looks to be a quite beautiful cover for this film. Moviemail's page suggests it is being released in March)

Its refreshing to see Second Run releasing debut features by very new directors, with this, Tarn's Black Sun, and Marais's Unpolished. I have to ask, Bikey, how did you come across this film, and what made Second Run decide to pick it up?

I suspect Bikey saw it when I did: at the London Film Festival two or three years back. It got quite a few votes in Sight & Sound's end-of-year poll, as I recall.

Did you like it much? I'm pretty much willing to blindly trust Second Run at this point, but what little info I can get on the movie is very divisive.

Final artwork:

I reckon you just sold me.

Full details of this release are now here at our website.

Neato on the short film. I always love those sorts of extras because of how they allow the main feature to be put into a better context.

E-Film Blog - reviewed by Michael Ewins

DVD Outsider declares The Lighthouse "A true landmark film"

Received my DVD today and just finished watching the film, which is quite beautiful and reminiscent of Tarkovsky as others have already mentioned. Set against a concrete historical backdrop, it nonetheless has a very dreamlike, perhaps even metaphysical quality. The newsreel/archive footage (most of which looks to have been shot at the time on low-grade video) is an interesting contrast to the main narrative's sumptuous 35mm texture and adds another dimension to the film, almost essay-like. The score is also superb, and it doesn't surprise me to read that Saakyan counts Greenaway as an influence, as some of the cues had a very Nyman-esque flavor.

I look forward to repeat viewings of this one, and I still need to check out the short film as well. Great release!

A wonderful review in this week's Time Out

Another review at Subtitledonline

A small but rather wonderful review from the current issue of Empire Magazine.

Gordon Thomas reviews The Lighthouse in the latest Bright Lights Film Journal

Is the DVD not flagged for 16:9 playback? It gets squished to 1.33:1 on my system. I had to manually 'stretch' the image to fill the 16:9 frame.

And by the way, this film having a score of 4.7/10 on imdb is a crime.... and even worse is the short film having 1.3/10... Who are these haters?

Another good reason to ignore IMDB ratings completely.

My disc was 16:9 out of the gates. Perhaps it's a hardware oddity?

This is a compelling film that feels a bit raw around the edges, like a first film of a director left to make her own mistakes should. Saakyan used a lot of complex techniques - some from Tarkovsky, sure, but the parallel strikes me as lazy and hugely incomplete considering the range of the film. It feels like a rare thing to see, which makes another kudo to Second Run in order.

Maybe so,
all my Warner/MK2 Chaplin DVDs get stretched out to 16:9 for some reason, and "Lighthouse" is like the exact opposite. These are the weird ones on my BD player.

And yes, I seriously urge others to watch this one. I hope her second feature will get a release and completion sometime soon.

I tried to watch a Warner Chaplin DVD a few weeks ago and had the same problem. It actually didn't stretch the image, but zoomed it in to fill the 16:9 screen, cropping the top and bottom with no way to restore this part of the image. I tried this on three different Blu-ray players and had the same problem on each. It only ended up working correctly on a DVD player.

Quite good, although as bunuelian suggests, it's also got signs of a first-time director finding her way. The direction at times calls attention to itself--so lovely at times, the roving camera starts to become nuisance toward the end--but Saakyan has a wonderful eye for composition and there are a number of really beautiful shots. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing more from this director.

Sorry, meant to say my Chaplin BDs are zoomed, so yes, my player had the same problem.

Anyway, in the Second Run booklet, the director talks about her next film she is working on. I sent her a message on facebook, commending her on this release and looking forward to her next.

manicsounds wrote:
Anyway, in the Second Run booklet, the director talks about her next film she is working on. I sent her a message on facebook, commending her on this release and looking forward to her next.

Thank you for doing that, manicsounds. It means a lot to the filmmakers when they get a personal note from you. We always forward to them any mail we receive about their film(s) which we have released and also the reviews.

So please, friends, feel free to email us and know that we will forward your email to them.