Theatre, ageing and the unfinished tragedy of Armenia: “Outliving Shakespeare” at the 2026 goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Film6 min read
Outliving Shakespeare, the 2025 Armenian-Dutch documentary by Inna Sahakyan and Ruben Ghazaryan, arrives with the weight of a small but significant cinematic event. Premiering in IDFA’s Luminous section, the film has already gained international visibility as a humane, politically resonant work about ageing, memory and dignity. Its importance was further confirmed at goEast 2026, where it won both the Best Documentary Film Award and the FIPRESCI Award for Documentary Film. What makes the film striking is not only its subject- elderly residents of an Armenian retirement home staging a Shakespeare-inspired play- but the way it turns this modest theatrical experiment into a reflection on Armenian history, Soviet legacies, war, displacement and the emotional cost of survival.
A retirement home becomes a stage
The premise of Outliving Shakespeare is deceptively simple. In a retirement home in Armenia, a theatre director gathers residents to perform Shakespeare’s Sins, a play in which Shakespeare’s own characters confront him over the tragic destinies he has imposed on them. Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, Ophelia, Lear’s daughters and other figures from the Shakespearean universe reappear not as distant literary icons, but as mirrors through which the residents can speak about their own lives.
From casting to rehearsal and finally to the premiere, the documentary follows the residents as they gradually open themselves to performance. At first, the project has the warmth of an art-therapy exercise: a way of bringing light, humour and movement into lives often defined by routine, loneliness and physical decline. Yet the film soon reveals that theatre is not an escape from reality, but a path back into it. The residents speak of love, abandonment, betrayal, bereavement and exile. Their personal histories begin to echo the Shakespearean tragedies they are rehearsing.
Artistically, the film is built around the contrast between theatrical imagination and the worn material world of the institution. The retirement home becomes almost a character in its own right, with its decaying Soviet-era architecture – peeling walls, worn furniture, faded murals and narrow lifts – animated by cats drifting through the corridors and by the strange presence of a care robot, which seems to embody a future that has arrived unevenly, and almost absurdly.
This visual setting matters. The Soviet past is not explained didactically; it is embedded in the walls, corridors and institutional habits of the home. The building carries the residue of a social model that once promised collective care but now appears exhausted, underfunded and emotionally insufficient. Sahakyan and Ghazaryan do not romanticize decay, nor do they simply condemn it. Instead, they film the space as a place of contradiction: neglected but alive, bleak but full of voices, obsolete but not empty. The camera’s patience allows small gestures – a rehearsal, a look, a joke, a dance, a moment of silence – to acquire emotional force.
Nagorno-Karabakh as the reality outside the stage
The Nagorno-Karabakh war forms one of the film’s most painful and politically charged backdrops. It does not dominate the documentary in the form of battlefield footage or explanatory commentary. Rather, it enters the film as an unavoidable pressure from outside, a reminder that the residents’ fragile theatrical world exists within a country marked by unresolved trauma.
One of the film’s most important narrative lines concerns a resident who had briefly returned to Artsakh – the Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh – after a ceasefire, only to come back to the retirement home following the forced displacement of the Armenian population by Azerbaijan. This thread transforms the film. What might initially appear to be a contained story about old age and performance becomes inseparable from the wider Armenian experience of war, exile and historical rupture.
The war functions as a constant reminder of the gap between theatrical tragedy and lived tragedy. In the rehearsal room, Shakespeare’s characters complain about the cruelty of their fates. Outside it, Armenians are living through losses that are neither symbolic nor literary. The residents may rehearse death, betrayal and exile, but the news from Nagorno-Karabakh insists that these themes are not confined to the stage. The theatrical world gives them language; the political world gives them urgency.
This is where Outliving Shakespeare becomes especially powerful. It does not oppose theatre and reality, as if one were false and the other true. Instead, it shows that theatre can expose reality more sharply. In the retirement home, Shakespeare becomes a grammar for suffering. The elderly residents are not merely “performing” tragedy; they are using performance to process the emotional debris of their own lives and of their country’s recent history. The war in Nagorno-Karabakh therefore does not simply provide context. It deepens the film’s moral stakes. It reminds the viewer that ageing in Armenia today can mean carrying several histories at once: personal grief, Soviet memory, post-Soviet hardship, and national displacement.
Reception in Armenia and social impact
Outliving Shakespeare should be understood less as a single measurable event and more as part of a broader Armenian conversation about memory, ageing, care and displacement. The film challenges several forms of invisibility at once. It brings elderly people to the centre of the screen, not as passive recipients of care, but as complex individuals with humour, desire, regret, creativity and agency. It also places a retirement home – usually a marginal social space – at the heart of national reflection. In doing so, it asks what a society owes to those who have lived through its most difficult decades.
The film’s Armenian significance is also linked to Sahakyan’s wider body of work. Her earlier documentary Aurora’s Sunrise, Armenia’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2023, dealt with memory, survival and the Armenian genocide. Outliving Shakespeare continues this concern with remembrance, but in a quieter, more intimate register. Instead of reconstructing a historical catastrophe, it observes people living in the aftermath of many accumulated catastrophes – family abandonment, institutional neglect, war, exile and old age.
In Armenia, a film like this matters because it refuses heroic simplification. Its residents are not presented as symbols of national suffering alone. They are funny, stubborn, vain, wounded, flirtatious, lonely and alive. That complexity is its social contribution. It expands the space for empathy at a time when public discourse around Armenia is often dominated by geopolitics, security and loss. Outliving Shakespeare does not deny those realities. It lets them echo through the corridors of a Soviet-era retirement home, while insisting that even there, amid decay and grief, people continue to rehearse, perform, remember and desire.
As a documentary, Outliving Shakespeare succeeds because it understands that survival is not a grand gesture. Sometimes it is a line remembered, a costume adjusted, a hand held, a dance on tired legs, or the courage to step onto a small stage and speak once more.
Outliving Shakespeare (2025) was screened as part of the 2026 goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Film.
