FR, ARM, QAT 2025 | Director: Tamara Stepanyan | Script: Tamara Stepanyan, Jean-Christophe Ferrari | Camera: Claire Mathon | Editing: Olivier Ferrari | Music: Cynthia Zaven| Colour & b/w | Production: Céline Loiseau, Alice Baldo, Tamara Stepanyan | DCP | 75 min | armenian, russian OV with engl. SUB | Cinephil

Ghostly cinema, done differently: Tamara Stepanyan sets out to trace the history of Soviet-Armenian film, speaking with her departed father, who participated in it himself, as an actor. As a child, she encountered this cinema history on television. Now, she weaves cinematic threads herself: of growing up in a family of artists, the collapse of the Soviet Union, exile in Lebanon, the yearning for home and her own path as a director. In her reappraisal, she draws on a rich reservoir of family films, archival images and iconic film scenes. The triumphant result is a tender, intimate mourning ritual and an homage: not only to internationally celebrated Armenian filmmakers like Sergei Parajanov and Artavazd Peleshyan, but also to lesser-known names and, above all, to the women who worked behind the scenes. (Gaby Babić)

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