Movie Review: In the Land of Arto — a thoughtful exploration of Armenia’s past, present, and future

Tamar Stepanyan’s first feature film, a timely and relevant look at Armenia’s tragic history, marks an impressive debut.

The film opens in the summer of 2021, as the French Céline (Camille Cottin) arrives in Armenia’s second-largest city Gyumri in an attempt to locate an official copy of her deceased husband’s birth certificate. When no record can be located — no Arto Saryan exists, only an Arto Santrosian — Céline is forced to question who her husband really was, sending her on a quest to uncover the truth.

From these first scenes, the film plays itself as classic psychological thriller — a woman digging into her husband’s hidden past. Yet, the story soon evolves as Céline confronts her husband’s past, sending her on a journey into Armenian history. All the while her husband’s spirit lingers with her, a silent character in the background, fading in and out.

Throughout the film, the camera lingers on the objects it wants to be noticed, starting with a series of recent graveyards along the train tracks from Yerevan to Gyumri. Soldiers with missing limbs pass in front of the lens, again drawing awareness to the film’s setting, just seven months after Armenia’s defeat in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War.

Once in Gyumri, Céline wanders the many abandoned and semi-collapsed buildings that have been left to waste away since the 1988 Spitak earthquake, which killed between 25,000–50,000 people and left tens of thousands more injured. She hears from the locals the hardships their families have faced, from the subsequent collapsed industry to the fact many of their loved ones remain buried in the rubble to this day, their bodies never properly recovered.

‘Many Armenians don’t have graves’, Céline’s taxi-driver in Gyumri, the first companion on her journey, says early on in the film.

Despite the film’s initial premise as a psychological thriller, it is pretty early on in the film that Céline discovers the truth about her husband’s name-change, which instigates the larger focus of the film — a more ruminative exploration into what the most recent Armenian defeat has meant for the population.

Céline spends the remainder of the film traveling to Nagorno-Karabakh with former Armenian soldier Arsine (curiously played by the Iranian actress Zar Amir), all the while learning the history of the conflict, the role her husband played in past events, and what it will mean for her family if she succeeds in gaining Armenian citizenship for her children, the whole reason she needed her husband’s birth certificate in the first place.

In many ways, Céline is just a proxy by which the film illustrates the many tragedies Armenia has faced in just a generation or two. This secondary story is the true masterpiece of the film, providing Western audiences a way to understand, as Céline learns to, what it means to be Armenian.

It is impressive that this is director Tamara Stepanyan’s first feature film, coming at the heels of her highly personal documentary My Armenian Phantoms. This documentary aesthetic crops up in places throughout the film as Stepanyan allows her characters to breathe and speak.

It is also noticeable in the blend of fact and fiction, such as when the well-known Nagorno-Karabakh Armenian rapper Valeri Lyoka Ghazaryan, who goes by the stage name Lyoka, raps to his own song ‘Hascen Im Nuynn A’ (‘My Address is the Same’) playing on the radio. It is a heartfelt song, with Ghazaryan singing about what it means to always want your home, yet being forced to remain abroad.

Cinematographer Claire Mathon, of Portrait of a Lady on Fire fame, also deserves a mention, as the film would not have had the same impact without her skillful camerawork, allowing Armenia itself the space to become its own character.

In the Land of Arto had a timely premiere at the 78 Locarno Film Festival on 6 August, just two days before Armenia and Azerbaijani initialled the text of a peace deal in the United States. Many of the topics touched upon the film, particularly in regards to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, remain relevant — yet it remains to be seen if Armenia and Azerbaijan can successfully reconcile with the history behind them.

Film details: In the Land of Arto (2025), directed by Tamar Stepanyan. It is set to be released on 31 December 2025 in France.