A Love Letter to the Ghosts of Armenian Cinema

My Armenian Phantoms will be projected at Los Angeles’ AFI Fest, October 22-26, and Amsterdam’s IDFA, November 12-23, in its Best of Fests section. Further screenings may be expected in Germany, Belgium, and the UK.

It’s been said that authoritarian regimes are good for a country’s cinema. Censorship may be a tool of brutal security states, but beauty can issue from artists’ lateral navigation of unfree expression.

If filmmaker Tamara Stepanyan has any opinions on this matter, her 2025 feature My Armenian Phantoms doesn’t reveal them. While the film offers an informed history of Armenian cinema, particularly that of the Soviet era, the filmmaker favors impressionistic anecdotes over grand pronouncements.

Born in Armenia, Tamara Stepanyan moved to Lebanon in the early 1990s, where she studied filmmaking at the Lebanese American University. She continued her studies at the National Film School of Denmark, focusing on documentary film. She now lives in France and is considered to be among the new voices of contemporary Armenian film.

Her feature film Embers (2012) premiered at South Korea’s Busan International Film Festival, where it won the best documentary prize. Her follow-up, Those from the Shore (2016), took best documentary at the Boston Film Festival and the Amiens Film Festival. Village of Women (2019) participated in over 30 festivals, receiving nine international awards and an étoile de la SCAM. Her first feature-length fiction film, The Land of Arto, starring Camille Cottin and Zar Amir Ebrahimi, debuted at the Locarno Film Festival’s 2025 edition.

The compulsion driving Phantoms is not an academic interest but a personal one — the death in early 2021 of the filmmaker’s father, Vigan Stepanyan, best known as a popular actor working in late Soviet theatre, television, and cinema, as well as international productions.

The filmmaker has said that making Phantoms was her way of prolonging a conversation with her father that was cut short by his death. His passing inspired a research project that saw her immerse herself in the archive of Hayfilm — the institutional hub of Soviet Armenian-language film production, diminished to a shadow of its former stature since independence. 

The film places the elder Stepanyan within the broader narrative of Soviet and post-Soviet Armenian cinema history. That story is refracted through the filmmaker’s recollections of growing up surrounded by artists and filmmakers, first in Yerevan, then in Beirut.

In conversation with an absence

Stepanyan’s exploration of Armenian cinema is replete with clips from historic films, including a number of landmark works (Armenia’s first silent feature, the first title to screen at Cannes, the last Soviet Armenian film) as well as a few titles from her father’s career, and the first acting role of his daughter, age seven. Interspersed among these clips are extracts from the filmmaker’s previous work — including footage of an affectionate exchange with her father while watching an Armenian film on TV.

Archive-based docs are liable to resemble montage, and Stepanyan and her editor Olivier Ferrari create an intriguing geography from the film’s array of vintage materials. Phantoms’ production footage, shot by veteran cinematographer Claire Mathon (Spencer, 2021), is notably slight. Mathon’s most memorable contributions are a brief segment at a monument to Vigan Stepanyan, an establishing shot of the Hayfilm building’s imposing façade, and a motif that follows the filmmaker as she strides down a gloomy corridor at Hayfilm. Together, these sequences comprise the film’s spare skeleton, complemented by Cynthia Zaven’s laconic, undulating piano score.

The story commences with home movie footage of the Stepanyan household when the filmmaker and her brother were youngsters. Stepanyan’s voiceover recalls movie night, a weekly institution at her parents’ house. A brief montage of vintage Armenian films fills the screen. As black-and-white footage shows a gathering of Young Pioneers, the Soviets’ co-ed Scouts, Stepanyan recalls how as a little girl she coveted the red Pioneers neckerchiefs of her brother and older cousins. The Soviet Union collapsed when she was 12 and, as Armenia had stopped working, Stepanyan’s family migrated to Beirut, where she began formal film studies.

The filmmaker’s childhood days elide naturally with the early years of Armenian cinema. When the scene cuts to Hayfilm’s exterior, Stepanyan’s voiceover reminds her father that both he and her mother’s parents had worked there. Accompanied by silent film clips, she notes that when Communism came to Armenia after 1917, the population was still recovering from the Ottoman Empire’s eradication of Anatolia’s Armenian population during WWI. Wanting to avoid any trouble with the Turks, the Kremlin outlawed any mention of the genocide in Soviet films, a ban that remained in place for some sixty years.

Other catastrophes were used as placeholders for the genocide. The disaster at the center of Hamo Bek-Nazarov’s Honor (Armenia’s first silent film), for instance, is an earthquake. When rescue workers uncover bodies with shovels, it isn’t wrecked buildings they remove but the soil of shallow graves. In the 1958 film Why Does the River Make a Noise, the Armenian character Atanes isn’t killed by Turkish gunmen but taken prisoner by them, forever forced to gaze at his homeland from the far shore of the Araks River. Though there is no mention of the genocide, Stepanyan notes, the iconic scene of Atanes standing before Mount Ararat can still make Armenian viewers weep.

The succession of vintage film clips is briefly interrupted by the first of several sequences following Stepanyan moving down a dimly lit corridor in the neglected Hayfilm building. This documentation of the neglect of cinema in post-independence Armenia might also evoke the shadow of Soviet censorship over Armenian cinema.

The scene introduces Stepanyan’s discussion of the censorship of the Stalin years — two decades when cinema served as a tool of state propaganda, and scriptwriters who deviated from this path could be shot. Yet this is also the period in which the filmmaker’s grandmother and her comrades (unaware of the purges being executed elsewhere in the USSR) were energetic party activists. 

In the wake of Stalin’s death in 1953, echoes of the French New Wave could be heard in Yerevan, not least in Frounze Dovlatyan’s 1966 feature Hello, That’s Me, the first Armenian film to be projected at Cannes. A short time later, Sergey Parajanov made his only Armenian-language feature, Sayat-Nova (The Color of Pomegranates), which aroused such scathing criticism from party apparatchiks that another editor was commissioned to recut it. The film’s tortured release history, and the sheer beauty of its mingling of poetry and stylized visuals, has made Pomegranates the best-known Armenian-language film.

Parajanov was imprisoned for four years. Stepanyan samples an interview with the director, filmed shortly before his death in 1990. He characterized Soviet films of the 1960s-80s as cardiograms of terror.

Stepanyan is again shown striding through Hayfilm’s gloom and here the shadows anticipate the untold story of Armenian women in the industry. All Armenia’s celebrated directors and cinematographers, and most of the star actors, were men. Most women were restricted to below-the-line technical work like film processing, dubbing and editing. That said, not all Armenian filmmakers were misogynists. Hamo Bek-Nazarov was a feminist and his films often depicted women as victims of Armenia’s patriarchal culture.

Stepanyan’s ruminations on the film sector’s entanglement with patriarchal social norms transition to reflections on her father and mother (a celebrated cellist), and the artists and intellectuals in their circle of friends. She dreamed of being part of this community, but when she declared that she wanted to be a filmmaker, her parents cautioned that cinema was a man’s profession. Years later, Stepanyan’s father overcame his misgivings and was delighted to hear she’d begun developing her first feature-length fiction. She cast him in that film, but he didn’t live long enough to act in it.

Filmmaking and self

For much of her career, Stepanyan has scrutinized the contemporary Armenian condition. Her work has generally avoided political themes and has not delved into the genocide. Her films’ most persistent motifs have been close to her own experience. Released in 2010, when she lived in Denmark, the short Little Stones interviews female migrants who find themselves living in northwestern Europe. Her second feature, Those from the Shore, 2017, documents the experiences of several families, many of them Armenian, entangled in the French bureaucracy’s response to Europe’s migrant crisis. The filmmaker’s 2019 feature The Village of Women, centers on Lichk, just south of Lake Sevan, where all men (retirees and children excepted) spend most of the year as seasonal laborers in Russia, leaving women to run the village.

Of Stepanyan’s previous work, the film that most anticipates Phantoms is her 2012 feature debut, Embers, which veers into her own life without lapsing into simple autobiography. Its touchstone was the loss of her grandmother, also named Tamara, a Communist partisan in Soviet Armenia during WWII. The filmmaker wanted to assemble the lady’s portrait from the recollections of her surviving friends, but the film resolves into something more universal. It profiles a generation who, from the perspective of their truncated existence in independent Armenia, look back on the Soviet era as a time of political experimentation, cosmopolitan idealism, and hope. As time has attenuated some characters’ memories, and toppled others into dementia, Embers becomes a contemplation of memory and identity, mortality and loss.

2025 has been a watershed year for Stepanyan. In February, My Armenian Phantoms premiered in the Berlinale’s Forum section. In the summer, her fifth feature, In the Land of Arto, debuted at Locarno, where it was the festival’s opening-night film. Phantoms can be read as an organic part of Stepanyan’s nonfiction practice, though, because state censorship was integral to the creative expression of Soviet filmmakers, the political aftertaste of Phantoms is stronger than Stepanyan’s earlier films. 

Arto is Stepanyan’s first fiction film since the 2011 short February 19. Featuring strong performances by Camille Cottin (House of Gucci) and Zar Amir Ebrahimi (Holy Spider), it tells the story of a French widow undertaking what she assumes will be a routine trip to register the death of her Armenian husband, Arto, and to secure their son’s nationality. Instead she finds that Arto had lied about his past, inventing an identity that concealed his involvement in the war in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) between Armenia and Azerbaijan. 

In Phantoms and Arto, strong female characters navigate a landscape inhabited by ghosts in order to come to terms with the stories of significant men in their lives. In both films Stepanyan brings political themes into the frame — whether Soviet censorship of Armenian cinema, or the bloody Armenian-Azeri dispute over Artsakh — without allowing politics to dominate her narratives.

Lateral storytelling

As Stepanyan’s voiceover in Phantoms glides from the patriarchal history of Armenian cinema to her parents’ reservations about her own filmmaking ambitions, she ruminates upon how she grew up surrounded by independent women while her father, her silent interlocutor, was rarely at home. A rising star in a male-dominated industry, he was forever at the theatre or on some film set.

The filmmaker’s reflections overlap with excerpts from The Song of First Love, a 1958 Soviet musical starring Khoren Abrahamyan, an old pal of her father. Abrahamyan plays a young pop singer whose celebrity so bloats his ego that he nearly loses his wife. This excerpt segues perfectly to another clip, shot by Stepanyan, showing her smiling father watching Abrahamyan’s performance on television. His smile slips slightly when he glances at his daughter on camera.

“It’s good,” she says, though it is unclear whether she’s referring to the Abrahamyan film or her own shot.

“Who,” replies the father, “me?”

“Yes,” she says, with a smile in her voice. “The colors. It looks nice.”

“Film director Tamara Stepanyan,” intones Stepanyan the elder, addressing the camera. “It’s a big problem for Armenian cinema.”

The exchange might be a comic encapsulation of the filmmaker’s earlier ruminations on Soviet censorship and Armenian cinema’s patriarchal heritage. Preceded by her reflections on her absent father, juxtaposed with the melodramatic dialogue of The Song of First Love, the father-daughter banter also suggests that Stepanyan recognizes the value of lateral storytelling.