My Sweet Land is a powerful and poignant documentary that explores what it is like to be a child growing up in a war zone — with the dawning realization that you will have to fight and probably die in the struggle to protect your homeland. It avoids any broader analysis of the political situation in order to tell the story from the child’s point of view. In this, it is very successful.
Armenian forces wrested control of Karabakh (Artsakh) from Azerbaijan in 1994, along with several other districts of Azerbaijan. In 2020, Azerbaijan forces launched an assault and regained those lost territories, though Armenians remained in control of the Karabakh province behind the protection of Russian peacekeepers. In 2023, Azerbaijan launched a second assault, which retook Karabakh, whose 100,000 residents fled to Armenia.
The film follows Vrej, who is 11 years old in 2020, as he goes about his life in the family house in Martakert, Karabakh. The film conveys the mundane and comforting routines of family life in a remote village. It is noteworthy, however, that the kids all have smartphones, and the house has a new washing machine. Vrej has pride in his village and is introspective beyond his years.
The family evacuated to Armenia after the 2020 war. They subsequently returned to Martakert, only to evacuate again in 2023. The film does not show any fighting, though we see the ruins caused by previous shelling, and in school, the children are taught to be wary of unexploded ordnance and land mines. Almost all the men are wearing combat fatigues. There are occasional distant explosions, presumably detonations of landmines by disposal teams.
It shows how war pervades the child’s world, from music videos to dinner table conversations to lessons in school. As Vrej grows older, from 11 to 13, he shifts from playing games with toy guns to a training camp where he learns to handle an actual AK-47. The school hall displays photos of young soldiers who died, all at a tragically young age. In a wrenching moment at the end of the film, Vrej turns to the camera and asks: “When this film ends, will I also die as a hero?” The film credits include a QR code inviting contributions to Vrej’s training as a dentist.
The film also serves as an object lesson in how nationalism works: from patriotic songs to history lessons in school. The scene where the children at the training camp come up in turn and define what a homeland is will be required viewing in my Nationalism class.
There are, unfortunately, many societies that have similar experiences, but there are few films that manage to capture this phenomenon with the degree of analytical and emotional depth we see in My Sweet Land. There are extreme examples of movies about children in wartime from World War II, both fictional (Elem Klimov’s Come and See, 1985) and fact-based (documentary and fictional versions of the life of Anne Frank). There is a visceral fictional film about child soldiers in West Africa, Beasts of No Nation (2005). From Ukraine, we have A House Made of Splinters (2022). There are a number of Palestinian films, both dramas such as Farha (2021) and documentaries such as Born in Gaza (2014) and Promises (2001). There is a previous documentary about the children of Karabakh (Artsakh), Tales of the Blue Sky by Vruir Tadevosian.
