Living in a kindergarten
2023 · 12m · Armenia
Directed by Aleksandre Keshelashvili
Genres: documentary, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Kindergartens in the Armenian towns of Masis and Artashat become makeshift shelters for displaced people from Nagorno-Karabakh living in limbo.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects war docs to scream; Keshelashvili does something weirder—he lets kindergarten rooms hold silence and displacement at once, turning the cute into something genuinely unsettling without ever winking at the camera.
A formally restrained piece that trusts the weight of juxtaposition—children's spaces as shelter, play infrastructure repurposed for crisis—working within documentary's long tradition of spatial testimony while refusing sentimentality.
The decision to shoot kindergartens as subjects rather than backdrops, letting the architectural ordinariness of primary colors and small furniture do the emotional work instead of faces, is what makes the displacement legible rather than performed.