Every once in a while, a film becomes more interesting for the silence around it than for the prize it receives. That is the case with There’s No Place Like Home, a documentary about the mass departure of ethnic Armenians from Azerbaijan’s Karabakh region in the autumn of 2023. The film won the Best First Feature award at the third Croatian International Film Festival, held in the Dalmatian coastal city of Šibenik from 24 to 27 July. It was not a glamorous premiere at Cannes or Venice, but a modest event on the Adriatic, with entries submitted through the FilmFreeway platform and the festival opening with the American picture The Friend, starring Bill Murray and Naomi Watts. Still, for a debut documentary on such a charged subject, a prize is a prize. Yet the most revealing moment was not the announcement of the award. It was the reaction from Yerevan—or rather, the complete absence of any reaction. Armenia’s Foreign Ministry did not mention the victory. The Ministry of Culture did not congratulate anyone. Armenian embassies did not organize screenings. The state-funded National Cinema Centre had nothing to do with the project. For a country that has built decades of international activism around telling its story of loss, this silence was not a bureaucratic oversight; it was a pointed statement. It was the quiet recognition that this film, whatever the intentions of its makers, belongs to a political narrative that Armenia’s current government is trying, with great difficulty, to leave behind.
To understand why, you need to know who made the film. Diana Madison did not follow the usual path to conflict documentaries. She grew up in Los Angeles, in a neighborhood called Little Armenia, where the memory of a lost homeland is passed down like a family Bible. Her parents arrived from the Soviet Union at the turn of the 1980s as refugees, and she grew up surrounded by stories of exile and loss. But her career was in entertainment, not activism. She interned at Entertainment Tonight, launched a popular YouTube channel called Hollyscoop, sold her digital studio, executive-produced the Lifetime show Glam Masters alongside Kim Kardashian, and later founded a cosmetics brand carried by Neiman Marcus and Bloomingdale’s. Before this project, she had never made a documentary. She was not a scholar of the Caucasus, not a journalist, not an aid worker. She was an entrepreneur with a powerful sense of identity and, by her own account, a conviction that Armenian stories had been suppressed by “propaganda and oil money.” In September 2024 she explained her strategy in an interview with the Los Angeles–based Armenian Weekly: use her industry connections, enter the festival circuit, and push the film all the way to the Oscar race. At that point, the project was described as a forty-minute film. In Šibenik, it received its prize as a first feature. It would be easy to dismiss Madison as an amateur, but that would be unfair. She made a film about something she cared about, and she made it with real skill. The problem is not her sincerity. The problem is the shape of the story she tells—and the fact that the Armenian state, with its own cool calculation, chose to pretend the film did not exist.
Yerevan’s silence is not a mystery; it is a policy. Over the past several years, Armenia’s government and the organized Armenian diaspora have drifted into an increasingly bitter conflict over the peace process with Azerbaijan. The initialing of a peace agreement at the Washington summit in August 2025 was a profound shift, and the Armenian National Committee of America responded with a congressional briefing titled Peace Without Justice in the South Caucasus. It called the agreement not a path to peace but a “scheme for the destruction of the Armenian state.” It described the US administration’s lifting of the Section 907 restrictions, which had long blocked military aid to Azerbaijan, as a “reckless step.” Yerevan answered just as directly. Speaking in parliament on 17 June 2026, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan blamed the Armenian opposition and diaspora organizations for Baku’s renewed rhetoric about “Western Azerbaijan.” He was saying, in effect: your campaigns for displaced Karabakh Armenians are being exploited by the other side to push new demands. The split even reached the subject of 1915, which for generations had been the single most important cause for the Armenian diaspora. In October 2024, Armenia’s Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan stated that international recognition of the events of 1915 was no longer priority number one; the new priorities were peace, stability, and normalization with neighbors. In June 2026, when the Israeli government approved a bill recognizing those events as “genocide,” Armenia remained silent for days, and Pashinyan eventually said he saw no need to respond. For diaspora institutions that had spent thirty years building their political capital on recognition campaigns, this was nothing less than a betrayal. But for a small state trying to survive in a hard neighborhood, it was strategy. The organized diaspora has an interest in keeping the conflict emotionally alive. The Armenian state has an interest in ending it. Madison’s film, no matter how personal and genuinely felt, belongs to the diaspora project. And that is why no one in Yerevan said a single word about its prize.
The Šibenik award is not an isolated case. In recent years, the international documentary circuit has been generous to Armenian-made films about the Karabakh conflict—and only to the Armenian side. Shoghakat Vardanyan’s 1489 won the main prize at IDFA in Amsterdam and the FIPRESCI award. Sareen Hairabedian’s My Sweet Land took the Grand Jury Award in the first-feature competition at Sheffield. Emily Mkrtichian’s There Was, There Was Not received awards at Mar del Plata and at Yerevan’s Golden Apricot. Inna Sahakyan’s Aurora’s Sunrise traveled to Annecy, Amsterdam, Lisbon, and Hamburg, and was submitted by Armenia for the Oscars. These films are praised for their humanity, and their directors are undoubtedly sincere. They speak of home, memory, exile, and loss in a language that European festival audiences understand and admire. But none of them tells the story of the people who lost their homes in the same lands earlier and under far more brutal circumstances. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis were driven out of Karabakh and from Armenian territory. They were expelled under gunfire, in winter conditions, with children and elderly people walking through snow. They then spent three decades in railway carriages, dormitories, unfinished sanatoriums, and tent camps. A whole generation grew up far from the villages of their grandparents, with no right to return. Their stories have been recorded. There are archives of oral testimony, photographs, documentary projects, and books. Anyone who wants to tell the story of Karabakh can find these materials. Yet in thirty years, not one Armenian-funded documentary, not even as a token of balance, has made those people its protagonists. The phrase “there’s no place like home” is true for everyone. But in the world of these films, it is true only for one community. The universal language of loss is spoken only in one direction.
The film itself, of course, presents the events of 2023 as forced displacement. Official Baku describes them differently: as a voluntary departure against the background of a reintegration and amnesty program, with residents offered the chance to remain and take Azerbaijani citizenship. There are photographs, video materials, and documented comments from Karabakh Armenians and experts that support this account. The film does not engage with that evidence. It also does not engage with the long history that created the situation. The Armenians who left Karabakh in September 2023 drove out in their own cars, along an observed road, over several days, carrying their belongings with them. There was real fear and real grief, and this should not be dismissed lightly. But the Azerbaijanis expelled from the same places decades earlier did not leave in their own cars. They fled under fire, barefoot, across cold snow, clutching children and whatever possessions they could carry. Their departure was not an amnesty program; it was a cleansing. The film does not mention this. It does not ask why the conflict began, who was removed from those lands before, or what happened to the Azerbaijani communities that once lived there. It begins with an exodus and presents it as if it were the first exodus. This is where the boundary between testimony and construction lies. Testimony is limited by what the witness saw. Construction is defined by what is kept out of frame. Madison’s film is a testimony for her community, and it is also a construction. The grief inside it is authentic. The reality inside it is not complete.
The choice of venue adds another layer of irony. Croatia is a country that lived through a war of its own, a war in which population displacement ran in both directions, and in which every side developed a complete, self-serving account of what happened. The people of Šibenik know what one-sided narratives look like, not from books but from experience. They also know that in real war, suffering cannot be divided into pure victims and pure villains. Yet the festival chose to honor a film that offers exactly that: one nation’s grief made cinematic, and another nation’s grief erased from the frame. Perhaps the organizers did not notice the asymmetry. Perhaps they did not think it mattered. But it does matter, because a prize is also a statement. Azerbaijan has its own history of the same places. Hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis were displaced from Karabakh and Armenia, and their memory of those lands is alive in ways that the international festival circuit has never recognized. That history has been documented, presented at diplomatic forums, and preserved in books and exhibitions. It will not disappear because a debut filmmaker won an award in a Dalmatian town. The final point, addressed to Armenian viewers, is the most important one. A film about the past will not change the situation of a single person who left Karabakh in 2023. What could change their situation is a durable peace—open borders, functioning roads, predictable neighbors, and a future in which the next generation does not have to choose between homeland and safety. The peace process between Azerbaijan and Armenia is not a gift from one side to the other; it is a necessity for both. Even Armenia’s prime minister says openly that a part of the organized diaspora is working against that course. How Armenia resolves that contradiction—between the state’s need for peace and the diaspora’s investment in the unresolved past—will determine the future of the region far more than any prize at any film festival.