On the Damascus Road in Lebanon's beautiful Bekaa Valley, an aging man with late-stage Parkinson's takes one last journey.
On the Damascus Road in Lebanon's beautiful Bekka Valley, an Armenian man with late-stage Parkinson's takes one last journey. This impressionistic film is a journey into the mind and life of a man with a crippling disease. In addition to the tremors and shakes, Barkev suffers from the lesser known 'monster' of Parkinson's, the relentless hallucinations that swing him back and forth between time and space. A machine maker and an amateur cosmologist, Barkev can no longer speak. Yet through his journals, his machines, and powerful imagery with music, the film travels both physically and metaphorically into the past and the future of both the man and his country Lebanon, a country debilitated by sectarian division not unlike Barkev's Parkinson's diseased body, left a shell of its former self by war, dwelling on the past, unable to imagine its own future.—Noura Kevorkian
The parents of Barkev Kevorkian survived the Armenian genocide, and his own life in Syria and Lebanon was never easy. Today, in the final chapters of his life, he is in an advanced stage of Parkinson's disease. Constant tremors and fatigue have made his body a helpless prisoner. Uttering a single sentence costs him so much energy that he no longer even tries to talk. This courageous documentary essay shot by his daughter Noura gives form to the thoughts this contemplative man struggles to set down in his notebook. A fragmented impression emerges out of the blur of the past: a love of fast driving, work at the foundry during the Civil War, and a fondness for cosmological theories. Is it reality? Memories? Or perhaps an optical illusion, that insidious escort of a nervous disorder. It seems that it's time to set out for a final 23 km trip across Lebanon's beautiful Bekaa Valley to visit a beloved bakery and a dairy farm, and thereby metaphorically make peace with ineluctably approaching death.—Martin Horyna, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
