The Absence of 1
The Absence of 1 unfolds in Bayrabat, an Armenian village now inhabited by families displaced in 1988. The filmmaker returns to her grandmother’s village, Bayrabat, after years of witnessing rising hatred and militarization following the Second Karabakh War, searching for traces of coexistence buried beneath the present. There, she meets Arshak, a 68-year-old photographer and hunter from her childhood, whose reflections on exile and his enduring bond with an Azeri friend open a space of grief and resistance beyond nationalist narratives.
Production stage: Production and Financing
Estimated release: late 2027
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Production team
Varduhi Balyan is a documentary filmmaker and journalist. She was born in Armenia to a family that had recently migrated from Shamkir, Soviet Azerbaijan. After graduating from the Turkish Studies Department of Yerevan State University, she moved to Istanbul. She earned her MA at Istanbul Bilgi University with a thesis on the role of civil society in the Turkey-Armenia normalization process. Her interest lies in topics such as memory, identity, dialogue, minorities, conflict resolution, and democratization.
Born in Istanbul in 1985, Nazım graduated from Istanbul University's Department of Archaeology and worked on numerous excavation and restoration projects for fourteen years before pursuing his passion for cinema. He later studied Sociology at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, focusing on Turkish modernisation and cinema.
Since joining istos film in 2020, he has worked as an editor and assistant editor on various film projects. In 2025, he received the Best Editing Award at the Kraken International Film Festival in Milan for İpekli Mendil, directed by Ömer Korman.
His interests also include music, Istanbul's urban history, and archaeology.