“I haven’t seen the movie. I cannot express my opinion. If I had seen, I would have said whether it had artistic value or was just politics. Although at festivals, not only at Cannes, they are not always guided by artistic principles. It is common to be guided by political overtones, but it is unacceptable for me,” Ruben Babayan, the director of the Hovhannes Tumanyan Puppet Theater, said about Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” a movie about lesbians’ love that had won the highest prize of the Cannes Film Festival, during a conversation with www.aravot.am. In response to an observation that the movie propagated homosexuality, Babayan said: “Propagation can mean anything.” With regard to Dominique Venner, a writer who had committed a suicide in Notre Dame Cathedral the other day in protest against the law allowing same-sex marriages that had been adopted recently, Babayan stated: “That movie won the highest prize, but life is much more valuable than taking such a step. As for the law adopted in France, I think no such thing will happen in our country. Since I am a Christian, in any event, I am strongly convinced that God
created men and women a bit different from each other, so that they can start a family, but it doesn’t mean at all that I am hostile toward such couples. However, I think that it is absurd to offer such couples an opportunity to adopt a child, because a child brought up in such a family will have complexes. And it doesn’t concern me who will have what relations with whom, but I am convinced that God surely took something into account while creating us and He didn’t make a mistake.”
Eva HAKOBYAN
