Tamara Stepanyan’s new creation marks powerful shift in the filmmaker’s career: her transition from intimate documentaries to fully-fledged fiction feature. But calling this a fiction is only partly accurate – every frame of the film is steeped in lived experience, in real wounds, in the textures of mourning and memory. For Stepanyan, fiction becomes not a departure from truth, but a deeper way of approaching it.
The story follows Céline (played with remarkable restraint and quiet strength by Camille Cottin), a French woman who travels to Armenia in order to register her husband Arto’s death. What should have been a bureaucratic act quickly unravels into something much more profound: a confrontation with secrets, lies, and the emotional debris of war. Arto, it turns out, was not the man she thought she knew. As Céline journeys deeper into his homeland – from Lake Sevan to the ruins of Karabakh – she unearths not only fragments of Arto’s identity but also pieces of her own.
It is no coincidence that Stepanyan herself left Armenia at the age of 12 and spent the next 30 years grappling with the sensation of a missing homeland. Armenia here is not just a backdrop — it is a wounded, living character. Its mountains, its ruins, its silences all speak. Céline’s journey mirrors that of Stepanyan’s own: the ache of return, the alienation of being a foreigner in a land that was once home, and the slow, painful process of trying to understand a country through its absences. It is a film about what is not said – about the stories we do not inherit, about the truths buried in war and silence.
Shot in natural light with documentary-trained cinematographer Claire Mathon, the film bears the meditative, observational gaze that shaped Stepanyan’s earlier work. There’s an unhurried pace to the way scenes unfold – often in silence – allowing landscapes and emotions to breathe. Real places and people from Gyumri, a city devastated by the 1988 earthquake, find their way into the narrative. There are veterans, amputees, haunted children, and two women – Céline and Arsine (played by Zar Amir Ebrahimi) – who become strange companions on a shared mission of burial and rebirth.
And yet, In the Land of Arto is not simply a film about war or grief – it is about the impossibility of fully knowing another human being. Céline thought she knew Arto. She didn’t. Through others – a former lover, old friends, a motherland left behind – she begins to assemble a new portrait of the man she loved. A man who, in the end, was destroyed by guilt and the trauma of a war that never really ended. Stepanyan handles this not with melodrama, but with grace – trusting the viewer to sense the invisible weights her characters carry.
Denis Lavant, cast as a ghostly veteran-soldier, adds a surreal, feverish energy to the film. He’s not tied to one war or language, but represents a more universal madness – the kind that emerges when war erases meaning. His presence underscores the film’s broader meditation: what does belonging entail? Does it mean inheriting grief? Or maybe passing on to your children?
One of the most powerful lines comes when Céline tells Arto’s friend: “I will give my son the birth certificate, the nationality. And he will decide what to do with it”. It’s a simple sentence, but it carries the full burden of inherited identity – a question every immigrant eventually confronts. What do we do with the stories we did not choose? There are no easy answers. This is not a film of closure – it is a film of opening, of unraveling. It’s an elegy disguised as a road movie, a war story disguised as romance, and a meditation on homeland disguised as fiction.
Ultimately, it is also a movie about women. The people who carry the memory of nations. Those who fight wars, bury men, raise children, and keep searching for the truth. In Stepanyan’s world, to be a woman is to endure and to remember. This is a deeply affecting, deeply personal film. One that lingers like a phantom pain.
In The Land of Arto just opened the 78th edition of the Locarno International Film Festival.
Don’t forget to check our exclusive interview with Tamara by clicking here.
