THE MOVING PICTURE BOY ARCHIVE

ON THE OLD ROMAN ROAD

Title: On the Old Roman Road
Year of Release: 2001
Director and screenwriter: the Armenian filmmaker Don Askarian (1949-2018)
Genre: Mystery, drama
Country of Production: Armenia, Germany and the Netherlands
Length: 1 hour 12 minutes
Languages: English and Armenian
Principal boy actor: Pavel Sahakyantz plays young Levon (about 13 years old); the little boy who is the heir to the Armenian throne is played by Ohan Askarian (presumably a relative of the director).
Availability: Unfortunately, this film has not had an official release on digital or physical format, though a poor quality digital file (with hardsubbed English subtitles) has circulated online.

Synopsis
The Armenian narrator, Levon (played by director/writer Don Askarian himself), lives on a boat in Rotterdam, where a complex spy drama is unfolding involving a sequence of assassinations connected to the old Turkish/Armenian rivalry: an influential circle of Americans has decided to insert a constitutional monarchy into the Armenian constitution and this leads to a Turkish secret service agent in Rotterdam being ordered to kidnap a boy descended from the Armenian King Tigranes II 'the Great' (reigned 95-55 BC, and called 'Tigran' in Armenian) who is the presumed heir to the throne. The agent does this, and casually murders the boy's mother in the process.

The agent is proud of what he believes to be his descent from the (Turkish) Qajars who once ruled Iran, and treasures an old painting of the Shah of Qajar Iran, which is stolen by an Armenian agent (identified simply as 'Lover & killer' in the credits - he is called a 'lover' because he is having an affair with a young married woman called Sylvia). When the Turkish agent identifies the stolen painting as being his, and thus confirms his identity as the abductor of the boy, he is himself assassinated.

The boy, meanwhile, is in the hands of another Turkish secret service agent, the 'Wolf-Dog', who is tracked down by the Armenian agent and assassinated. When the Armenian agent finds that the man to whom he is supposed to deliver the boy has himself been assassinated, he decides to hand the boy over to Levon on his boat. The Armenian agent then goes on a car ride with the husband of Sylvia (the woman with whom he is having an affair). When Sylvia tries to phone him, she can't get through, and his fate is unknown.

Meanwhile, Levon and the Armenian boy drift down the river, being joined by the boy's companion dog.

The narrative is interspersed with dreams, surreal images and recollections of Levon's boyhood in Eastern Anatolia, where Levon's house was on part of an old Roman road, and where he grew up in a community riven by deadly conflict between the Armenians and the Turks.

Source material
The closing credits of this film inform us that the story is partly based on the autobiographical work Life on the Old Roman Road (published 1930) by the Armenian writer Vahan Totovents (1894-1938). To date, this work does not seem to have been translated into English.

Screenshots (best quality file Editor could find), with Pavel Sahakyantz as Levon as a boy

Below: Ohan Askarian (left) as the heir to the Armenian throne, with writer/director Don Askarian as Levon

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