A document held in the State Archive of Armenia shows that issues related to Armenfilm’s international contracts were discussed at the state level as early as 1998.
The document is a report submitted to Roland Sharoyan, Armenia’s Minister of Culture, Youth Affairs and Sport, by David Matevosyan, Head of the Department for Cinematographic Affairs. It concerned the results of a review of the activities of the Armenfilm film studio.
The report examined several contracts signed by the studio. They concerned different forms of film exploitation, including television use in Armenia, the territories of Russia and the CIS, the United States and Canada, videocassette distribution, and copyright protection.
The document noted that Armenfilm had attempted to enter the international market and protect its films from unauthorised use. At the same time, it identified problems in the contracts, including incomplete and vulnerable legal wording, as well as weak mechanisms for financial and legal control over partners.
The report also refers to contracts for which the available text does not clearly disclose the counterparties, territories, terms, or full conditions. This indicates that uncertainty in Armenfilm’s contractual framework already existed in the 1990s.
It is important that these contracts were signed before the studio’s later organisational and legal transformations and before the 2005 privatisation process. They therefore belong to an earlier contractual layer that should have been accounted for in subsequent stages.
The 1998 report shows that the ministry was aware of legal and control-related problems in Armenfilm’s contracts. What remains unclear is whether a complete list of those contracts was later compiled, and whether their terms, territories and possible legal consequences were ever fully reviewed.
