Filmmaker Emily Mkrtichian didn’t know she would be making a war documentary when she embarked on her near-decade-in-the-making feature There Was, There Was Not . What began as a project aiming to explore the lives of four disparate women in post-conflict Artsakh changed almost overnight as the long-beleaguered breakaway state, sandwiched between Azerbaijan and Armenia, became the site of ethnic cleansing of its majority indigenous Armenian population in the wake of a major escalation in a dormant conflict.

“Everything was totally confusing and scary,” the documentarian tells Deadline in an interview. “And at that moment, I understood that the film that we were making was absolutely going to change, but it took several years to understand what that meant, and so I stayed through the

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