Roger Kupelian

The battles between the ruling empires and houses of nobility that would decide the fate of the Caucuses, the real Middle Earth, and ultimately the fate of the Western World.

In the early 1990's, as the Soviet Empire disintegrated, two former Soviet Republics, Armenia and Azerbaijan, squared off against each other over the fate of the 170,000 Armenians living in the small mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The war eventually claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced close to a million people. By the time of the tenuous cease-fire, most of the enclave was in the hands of its longtime Armenian inhabitants. Dark Forest in the Mountains was shot on location in Nagorno-Karabakh and uses a mix of digital animation, live footage and expert interviews to tell the story of that region of the world, and the events that led up to the conflict. It also focuses on N.K.'s northernmost territory, Shahumian, and the partisans who manned its treacherous Gulistan Front.