Welcome to 25 for 25 my project to watch and eat my way around the world in 2025 with 25 movies from 25 countries matched with 25 country themed dinners. Today’s entry is Armenia but you can see the full Masterlist to watch and cook along with me.
Country: Armenia
Movie: Vodka Lemon
Director: Hiner Saleem
Year: 2003
The Elevator Pitch: Hamo, a poor window who is living in remote village has lost his wife, most of hi possessions, and his children have amounted to nothing. Clinging on to the last bits of life, he meets Nina a bar maid and makes a try at love again.
How Was the Movie?: This was quite a melancholic movie and out of all the ones we’ve watched so far the one that I felt I was missing the most contextually from in terms of language politic and culture. Since this movie is a kind of main story line with a few little vignettes in between the problem isn’t complexity but that I was born in a big city and I struggled with some of the rural/remote understanding more than anything.
The film titters on the edge of funny and sweet very often but it ultimately is as cold and harsh as the village itself. The opening is absurdist but the movie is actually pretty standard the rest of way through which accidentally set me up to be disappointed but I’m sure other people are more reasonable. I loved the love story in this which just feels realistic and patient (I don’t have a better word for that). In the end I wasn’t in a place to enjoy the movie because there is a part of me that worries this kind of life is coming for a lot of people and the crushing poverty where very little joy is to be found is behind me but I also worry too much that it might be in front of me as well.
Overall fairly enjoyable with a bunch of memorable moments but also I do kind of wish we hadn’t picked such a bitter film that day.
What was for Dinner?:
I ended up buying some store bread that was close but not exactly the same as Armenian bread because I just didn’t have it in me to make bread that day and unfortunately I don’t have an open grill but other than that this was an absolutely amazing meal. To start with we have the Eetch which is a cooked bulgur dish. This was good but I don’t personally love bulgur, my husband ate the entire pot though so obviously it was delicious if you even vaguely like bulgur. The main dish was khorovats. I felt like I was letting the team down making grilled meat but the marinade for this made it sooooo good. I’m not a big meat eater, and I used chicken for this so it’s not traditional, but this was probably the best grilled meat I have ever made? I ate a comedy amount with lots of yogurt and fresh herbs on bread and just really had a good time.
Of course we also drank vodka lemonade cocktails. It felt illegal not to 🙂
For dessert I made gata. This is a kind of bread casket like “cake” filled with nuts, flour, and sugar. I was sure I hated this after the first bite and then actually it turned out I loved it and we ate this cake all week. If you’re expecting any Western conception of cake it will probably throw you for a loop but once I adjusted to the fact that it’s more of a hard shell pastry I was fine. I made 1/3 of the recipe and it was still gigantic though so be mindful that it seem most recipes are written for 20 people!
That’s it for Armenia, see you next in Sweden!