Review | Tonratun — A dispatch from a communal Armenian bakery

★★★★☆

Armenian director Inna Mkhitaran’s debut documentary opens up the private, feminine world of the village bakery.

TONRATUN, or, The History of Armenia as Told by Women, is a 2022 documentary by Armenian photojournalist Inna Mkhitaryan.

The word ‘tonratun’ refers to the room or bakery where lavash, a thin Armenian flatbread, is cooked in the ‘tonir’, a clay oven set deep into the ground. Owing to the traditional division of labour between men and women in rural Armenia, the tonratun was an exclusively female space, a multifunctional haven — besides making bread, the stove would be used to heat water to bathe and make coffee — where women would congregate and talk.

Inside, unlike elsewhere in the village where men or children were present or in close proximity, the talk was frank, uninhibited. As Mkhitaryan’s mother, the film’s protagonist, says: ‘We would look forward to it all week’. It was where women could talk freely, covering all sorts of ground: abortion, war, prophecies, husbands, children — the history of Armenia and its future.

The content of these conversations is what interested Mkhitarayan, so she managed to convince her mother and her mother’s friends to relight the stove in her native village after 20 years and film them at work, talking.

The film opens with Mkhitaryan’s mother standing and kneading dough, alone in the stone room, her humped back bent into an uneasy right-angle. At first, when Mkhitaryan asks her mother about the tonratun, her mother is evasive, refusing to reveal what the women would talk about. She relents later in the film, but the scene demonstrates how Mkhitaryan had to push at the confidentiality of the tonratun.

However, as the film proceeds, the audience sees how baking is more than an excuse to talk privately. Like walking or driving, activities that require some concentration and do not necessitate eye-contact, baking facilitates self-disclosure. It allows these women to talk to one another, and to Mkhitaryan, with less self-consciousness than they otherwise might.

Mkhitaryan leans into this aspect in the second scene, while interviewing one of the other elderly women of the village. We see only this woman’s hands, kneading, rolling, and then throwing the dough off-camera, with a reflexive expertise that smacks of decades of practice. She unhurriedly tells Mkhitaryan the details of her life: the descendant of a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, she was married at 18 (it was not a love match) after which she moved to a village, the inhabitants of which viewed Mount Ararat as sacred. During the Soviet period, she says, a few villagers were thrown into prison for their apparently idolatrous speeches on the subject of the mountain.

During the discussion, Mkhitaryan is gentle. She doesn’t push with her questions, she lets the dough and the silences provide their own encouragement.

With her own mother, however, Mkhitaryan is more blunt. For most of the documentary, Mkhitaryan films her mother and her mother’s three or four friends, who have known one another for decades, at work in the tonratun. They no longer bake communally, it seems, but they tell Mkhitaryan that during the Soviet Union, when there was so little fuel, it was the only option.

The women all respond differently to Mkhitaryan’s more sensitive questions. Some answer freely, others are more reticent, sometimes responsive to their friends’ encouragement, other times growing indignant and clamming up.

Much of the conversation is on the subject of children. The women in the film come from huge families of 10 or more kids; abortion was not something their mothers considered or even knew about, they tell Mkhitaryan. Their generation was different. There’s one particularly moving scene in which each of the women admit, in varying tones of defiance and regret, to the number of abortions each has had. Some of their husbands knew about the procedures; others didn’t.

They tell Mkhitaryan that every expectant mother in every generation prays to have a boy, as no mother wants to subject a daughter to the same fate they suffered. They believe boys are freer, their lives are better, and that they provide a household, as well as the homeland, with security. In their time, they relied on a village head with a talent for prophecy to decide whether or not they would abort their babies. These days, they say, women get hospital tests and then take action accordingly. The result is many fewer female babies than male. ‘It’s a great sin’, one of the women says, but all understand the logic.

Their feelings about children are intertwined with their feelings about Armenia’s fate.

‘Europeans’, Mkhitaryan’s mother says, ‘can adopt a dog and enjoy life, but we need children, we need to procreate’. Their duty and their primary function as women is to produce children who can defend a homeland that has been persecuted for centuries, she says — ‘We’ve never lived for ourselves’.

Mkhitaryan works hard to draw out the ambiguity around this burden. Her mother prides herself on never having attempted to stop her husband or her son fighting in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. This act of sacrifice is important to her: it is the right, patriotic way of things, even if it continues to make her suffer. But one can see why giving over one’s life to the production and raising of children, only to send them off into conflict, is not a fate any woman would wish to pass onto her daughter.

Mkhitaryan made the unconventional decision to feature in the film, perhaps because, with her camera and small crew, she had already disrupted the confidentiality of the tonratun. We hear her voice, and in certain scenes, she sits in shot with the women, guiding the conversation. Mkhitaryan’s on-screen participation becomes a source of tension: you feel that her mother’s resignation to the fate of women frustrates and depresses her, especially in the final scene.

Above all, Tonratun is a eulogy to the communal process of making lavash — the mixing, kneading, rolling, the flattening of the dough onto a humped cushion that fits the inner curvature of the stove, the unsticking and the tasting. Mkhitaryan renders it simply, giving the film an elemental quality. Moreover the women themselves are brilliant, and the humour that threads through their conversations is what rounds the film out into a really memorable artefact.

Film details: Tonratun (2022), directed by Inna Mkhitaryan. It is available to stream on DAFilms.com.