Emma Ward
Emma Ward is a writer and film critic from northern Virginia. Her work has been published by Bright Wall/Dark Room and The Pulitzer Center, among others. She took part in Reverse Shot’s Emerging Critics Workshop during the First Look 2023 festival.
Vardanyan weaves back and forth between depictions of creation and destruction, presence and absence, the emotional and the bureaucratic. That these apparent paradoxes coexist onscreen emphasizes the incomprehensibility of the family’s situation as a whole.
The River Is Not a Border retraces the events of 1989 with an attentive but unobtrusive hand. Diago casts his participants not just as subjects but as storytellers, resulting in a film guided more by memory and feeling than historical fact or cinematic flair.