THERE WAS, THERE WAS NOT - Mark Reviews Movies

There Was, There Was Not, Watermelon Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 9, 2025

How does a country disappear? It has happened throughout history, and recent and current events suggest that it could happen again and again—sooner than many might believe. There Was, There Was Not documents how the state of Artsakh, which existed between Armenia and Azerbaijan for 32 years, ceased to be in 2023.

Director Emily Mkrtichian did not set out to witness this happen, of course, but she and her crew were in Artsakh when Azerbaijani began a military campaign against the state, firing rockets and other artillery into the capital city of Stepanakert. When the assault arrives here, it is completely unexpected, and there's a horrifying shot in which one of the camera operators rushes out of an apartment building to the sounds of air raid sirens, turns the camera around the scene of the city, and just lays it on ground as the sight of billowing smoke and nearby explosions becomes too much to handle.

The idea of this is infuriating enough, but this film makes it even more so, simply because this documentary was never meant to be about war, displacement, and ethnic cleansing. Mkrtichian arrived in Artsakh with a relatively more innocent goal: to follow the lives of four women in that country, as they exist in a place that had experienced conflict in the past, that struggles to see and treat women as wholly equal parts of society, and that they still call home regardless of the troubles of the past or present.

The future is what matters to these women. To watch it all ripped away from them in an instant is devastating.

Mkrtichian's decision to keep the film focuses on these four lives the entire time, even as the situation in Artsakh becomes much bigger and more significant than any of them, is why this documentary makes the impact it does. Yes, the scope and scale of the war may make the stories of each of these women seem smaller by comparison. On the other hand, each of these stories is, in some way, representative of so many other people in Artsakh. They stand in for an entire population in a manner that we can feel on a personal level.

The filming began in 2019, when tensions with Azerbaijan and nearby Turkey are on the rise but not necessarily signaling anything of what's to come. Mkrtichian introduces her subjects one at a time, only by first name to give the closer connection. Sveta is a single mother of three children, the oldest a teenager, and works the perilous job of helping to find and remove landmines from the first war over this region from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. When it was part of the Soviet Union, Artsakh existed as an autonomous region for its ethnically Armenian majority, and with the fall of that empire, the war escalated until Artsakh's victory and an agreement that resulted in its independence.

Meanwhile, Siranush is a politician, running for election on Stepanakert's city council in the hopes of raising awareness of women's issues throughout Artsakh. Her campaign ends in defeat, and indeed, not a single woman on the ballot won any election.

It's little wonder, then, that Gayane does the work she does. She runs a center for women, helping find shelters for victims of domestic abuse and hosting discussions for people to debate women's issues in the country. She is married to a loving, supportive husband, whose own job could be in jeopardy if anyone in power feels slighted or threatened by Gayane's work, and the two have two children, one of whom is of an age that he would be conscripted into the military if necessary.

Finally, there's Sosé, a martial artist who has competed in multiple tournaments and has dreams of becoming an Olympic athlete. She keeps stuffed animals now, because she didn't have them growing up, and her only worry at this moment is whether or not she'll win a medal in an upcoming tournament.

Then, the rockets and bombs come. Everything is put on hold, because their lives, the lives of their families and friends, and the existence of their homeland are under direct, immediate threat.

The best that can be said of this situation for these four women is that they are, in their own respective ways, prepared for this conflict in some way. Sveta's explosives expertise, for example, means that she is now handing out pamphlets and educating people on new types of ordinances that have been fired into the country. Likewise, Gayane is also organized, now using her talents and knowledge for housing those in need to find living spaces for those in the line of fire.

For her part, Sosé volunteers for the military, winds up in the trenches on the frontlines, and seems as satisfied as can be expected to have a fight in front of her that matters much more than winning a medal. Only Siranush seems to lose some sense of purpose, since war is more or less the end the political career she had in mind, but she does have a family to aid. At one point, Siranush, sitting on the front steps of her apartment building, and Sveta, handing out those pamphlets, meet, and the politician's refusal to let this war dictate her actions is, in its own way, a small bit of inspiring defiance.

None of this overshadows the tragedy of the situation, which is that none of these women—no one in Artsakh, for that matter—should be in this situation in the first place. There Was, There Was Not becomes an intimate look at lives in war and, ultimately, a personal testimony of what it means for a country to disappear.

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