“The Era of New Sincerity”
We titled the project “The Era of New Sincerity” because we want to bring back into the conversation about great people something that has long been missing — honesty of heart and clarity of motives. We are used to remembering Griboedov only as the author of Woe from Wit, but before us is a far more complex, complete figure — a thinker, a diplomat, a man of rare conscience, who knew how to combine aesthetic subtlety with state courage.
He lived on the border of worlds — Russian and Persian — and it was exactly on this border that he assumed a heavy role: through risk, conflict and political pressure to achieve a humane result for living people. For me Griboedov is not a bronze monument, but an example of how the word, the mind and compassion can influence the course of history no less than cannons.
What moves me especially is his compassion for the Christian population of the South Caucasus. That compassion was not abstract; it was embodied in concrete steps, negotiations, documents, programs of returning people to liberated lands. In a world where great powers often see only the chessboard, Griboedov saw faces — women and children, the elderly and refugees. He understood the price of freedom not as rhetoric, but as the right to a home and a peaceful life.
Hence his willingness to carry matters to a political “clash of empires” when the powerful of the world understand no other language. I choose him because there is no cult of strength in this courage; in it lies the protection of the weak and responsibility before history.
Film about Griboedov is not a school lesson on a big screen, but a living drama of choice. Between the silence of offices and the roar of batteries, between intellectual subtlety and the harsh reality of diplomacy, between personal feeling and the highest state task. Such a hero “breathes” through the frame: he has inner music — subtle and demanding; he has a conflict — ethical, not decorative.
His fate combines poetry and politics, and therefore the language of cinema here is natural: visually to show how decision is born, how word turns into action, how private conscience changes public order. I want viewers to see not a legend without roughnesses, but a living man who makes mistakes, doubts, but goes the whole way — for someone else’s pain, accepting it as his own.
Today, when the world again cracks along lines of culture and borders, the story of Griboedov sounds modern and direct. We argue about the value of diplomacy, about the cost of peace, about the limits of intervention and responsibility; we see millions of people whose homes and fates are broken by big calculations. Griboedov reminds us: humanism is not an ornament of political language but its justification. Sincerity is not weakness, but a demand on oneself and one’s era.
My film is an attempt to bring the conversation about the state into the human plane, where decisions are measured by lives, not only maps. “The Era of New Sincerity” is an invitation to look at strength through the prism of compassion and at history through the fate of a particular person. And, finally, I choose Griboedov because he opens a rare optic of hope for art. His path shows: the word can be a sword, but more often — a bridge; politics can destroy, but it can also return people home. In this film I want to combine the beauty of language and the courage of action, depict the Caucasus as a space of trials and reconciliations, and Yerevan as a symbol of restored dignity. We will film not a monument and not a panegyric, but an honest story of love — for people, for truth, for one’s mission.
If “The Era of New Sincerity” manages to light even one candle of understanding in the darkness of cynicism, then the choice of Griboedov is correct.