"Spiritual Strongth": Armenian Cinema Awarded in Sofia by Carlo Coppola
Some stories do not need to be invented by cinema, but only to be discovered and placed within the right storytelling. This is one of the messages coming from the Golden FEMI Film Festival in Sofia, Bulgaria, which on June 6 awarded its most significant recognition to one of these narratives. The international jury prize went to the documentary Spiritual Strongth by Armenian director Milena Hovhannisyan, received with great satisfaction by numerous Armenian cultural institutions as further confirmation of the creative vitality of a people that knows how to transform wounds into art.
The gala ceremony saw the Ambassador of the Republic of Armenia to Bulgaria, Tsovinar Hambardzumyan, accept the award on behalf of the director and address the assembly, affirming the centrality of cinema as the language of human dignity — a space in which cultures recognize one another not through uniformity, but through particularity that is lived and transmitted. In her speech, she expressed particular gratitude to the festival’s artistic director, Bulgarian screenwriter and director Efemia Fard, the creator of an intercultural dialogue platform that, in just a few years, has established itself as a key event in the festival landscape of Central and Eastern Europe.
The film tells the story of a man who, following a devastatingly brutal accident, lost both of his hands. A loss that could have reduced him to silence. But it did not. With the tenacity of one who does not see his existence as mere survival, the protagonist embarked on the arduous path of self-reconstruction, establishing himself as an inventor and innovator. Hovhannisyan’s camera does not linger on or exploit the suffering to elicit easy tears; instead, it accompanies the subject with that respectful distance that is the surest sign of artistic maturity. The jury recognized in the work both the power of its human message and its artistic value — two qualities that the Golden FEMI places at the heart of its mission: promoting environmental awareness, social inclusion, recognition of women’s contribution to cinema, and support for the most vulnerable segments of civil society.
Armenia was not the only protagonist of the evening. Awards were also given to works from Argentina, Indonesia, Poland, Lebanon, Cyprus, Mongolia, and Morocco: a geography of perspectives that testifies to the genuinely universal vocation of a festival capable of bringing together cinematographies far removed in tradition and latitude, united by the shared conviction that cinema is a tool for understanding.
The Ambassador recalled how artistic and cultural exchanges between Armenia and Bulgaria represent one of the strongest threads in the bilateral relationship between the two countries — a bond rooted in a common history of peoples who have known trials, diaspora, and the need to preserve their identity beyond borders.
Carlo Coppola
Behind a festival award lies a man without arms who chose to create, a director who chose to observe, and a people that, wherever it goes, never ceases to bear witness to itself and its millennia-old culture. Just as Hrand Nazariantz transformed the loss of his homeland into song, the protagonist of Spiritual Strongth transforms the loss of his body into invention: similar gestures, immensely distant in time and circumstance, united by the same logic of a human dignity that does not surrender.
To Milena Hovhannisyan, and with her to Efemia Fard and the entire Golden FEMI family, and to the Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador H.E. Tsovinar Hambardzumyan, who so admirably represents the Armenian people in Bulgaria and North Macedonia, go our most sincere congratulations, with the wish that this gaze continues to illuminate what the clamor of the world too often leaves in the shadows.
