Tamara Stepanyan’s film In the Land of Arto begins with a service interruption that functions as a metaphor. Céline (Camille Cottin) is traveling by train to Gyumri, the second largest city in Armenia, to legalize the death of her husband Arto, who died by suicide in France. The train breaks down before entering the city, forcing Celine and everyone else to finish the journey by foot. Untethered from the passenger compartment, the film’s cinematographer, Claire Mathon, follows the procession with her camera. Wild umbels litter the train tracks, suggesting new growth, but so far the outskirts of Gyumri look post-apocalyptic. Aftershocks from the Spitak 1988 earthquake that devastated the region are everywhere. Buildings are dilapidated rather than reconstructed and, unlike Western Europe where the trains are prompt, this one is indefinitely delayed by the film’s reality and symbolically by Armenia’s collective trauma.
Before premiering In the Land of Arto at the 78th Locarno Film Festival, Stepanyan was primarily known for her nonfiction work. Born in Yerevan, Armenia in 1982, she and her family relocated to Lebanon following a series of upheavals, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, the energy crisis known as the “dark and cold years” in Armenia, and the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in 1993. A sense of yearning for her homeland permeates Stepanyan’s work. Her latest documentary, My Armenian Phantoms, premiered at the 2025 Berlinale. In it, the director interweaves family videos with largely forgotten works of (Soviet) Armenian cinema, crafting a kind of cinematic séance for her late father, Vigen Stepanyan, a beloved Armenian actor from the 1970s onward.
Stepanyan continues to explore the emotional and historical threads of the Armenian diaspora with In the Land of Arto. In her first work of narrative fiction, she establishes Céline as a cipher for the diasporic gaze. Céline enters Gyumri’s “Regional Archive Center” as a wide-eyed French woman, and learns that there are no records of Arto anywhere. The Center is far from digitized. Instead, it’s operated by a group of local women who maintain an analog archival system. Their work, rooted in paper records, personal memory, and daily routine, reflects both a commitment to preserving their recent histories and the broader infrastructural delays that mark Armenia’s slow progression toward modernization. Mathon emphasizes this idea with slow pans that linger over dusty files and close-ups of handwritten ledgers. Céline is a fish out of water in this environment — Cottin’s vacant, overwhelmed gaze emphasizes that — but she still desperately seeks answers even when there are no easy solutions. She finds a friend in Macha (Christine Hovakmiyan), who unearths Arto’s last known residence in Gyumri.
Unfortunately, his neighborhood no longer exists. As Céline scouts the rubble of former schools, factories, and apartment buildings that were destroyed in the 1988 earthquake, she asks where the graves are for all the lost souls that were affected by the disaster, and her guide Armen (Shant Hovhannisyan) reminds her that many Armenians living in this area don’t have graves — their bodies have remained underneath the rubble. Stepanyan gets a bit heavy-handed here with metaphors, but it’s important that she showcases the disaster as it still stands today because no large-scale recuperation ever happened. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, three years after the earthquake, but before that, aid to Armenia was slow despite rebuilding efforts from former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. After independence, Armenia endured severe economic hardship, including an energy crisis, hyperinflation, and a war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. The country was also under blockade by Turkey and Azerbaijan, which limited access to building materials and slowed reconstruction efforts dramatically. In many ways, the rubble represents all of Armenia’s recent collective trauma, and stands as a monument to the Armenian people, whether intentional or not.
Céline starts to understand her surroundings after seeing the former disaster site, but Cottin’s performance remains restrained, her detachment seeming more mannered than lived-in, leaving certain emotional beats underdeveloped. Mathon, who is perhaps best known for working with Céline Sciamma on Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Petite Maman, overcompensates for this with incessant close-ups of Cottin’s face, but Céline is also underwritten by Stepanyan. The character functions more as a narrative device than a fully realized character, and while her physical presence anchors the film, her internal motivations — like her obsessive desire to retrace her husband’s steps — remain out of sight and somewhat spiritless. We are given little access to her interiority beyond her role as a seeker, making the protagonist feel hollow and uninviting.
The opposite problem happens when we meet Arsiné (Zar Amir). She’s working as a local guide and helps Céline navigate Armenia outside of Gyumri. Unlike the protagonist, Arsiné is open and warm, but it’s a tactic that’s as transparent as their so-called bond that develops during bizarre karaoke car sessions. Despite the lack of character development throughout In the Land of Arto, Arsiné’s narrative exhibition provides context for Armenia’s ongoing conflict with Azerbaijan. Information here is heavy-handed, but it’s also two-fold: it helps Céline understand Arto’s homeland, but also shows Arsiné’s devotion to her country. While this aspect of the film is undoubtedly moving, the latter half becomes overcomplicated with Armenian nationalism that includes illegal arms trafficking and a random cameo by Denis Lavant as a shepherd named Rob.
Despite its flaws, In the Land of Arto’s strength lies in its depiction of Armenia’s physical and emotional ruins, and in Stepanyan’s continued engagement with diasporic longing. The film explores the lingering trauma of Armenia’s past, especially the 1988 earthquake, and the complexities of diasporic return, but ultimately it suffers from poor character development and overly complicated second and third acts. Mathon’s cinematography does a lot of heavy lifting in order to fill in emotional gaps through intimate framing, but overall Stepanyan overstuffs her narrative feature with enough themes and geopolitical context to fill a six-part documentary. Her instinct to educate and preserve is admirable, but the result feels didactic and overburdened.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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