‘In The Land Of Arto’ review: Camille Cottin and Zar Amir star in thoughtful Armenian drama

Dir: Tamara Stepanyan. France/Armenia. 2025. 104mins.

Celine (Camille Cottin) heads from France to Armenia in June 2021, six months after the loss of life by suicide of her husband Arto. She thinks it is going to be a fast journey to gather his delivery certificates so she will be able to declare her kids’s citizenship. In truth, it marks the beginning of a journey that may take Celine throughout the nation to find the reality about her husband, in a movie that explores tensions between exile and homecoming, and the haunting impression of warfare on those that depart and people who stay.

Stepanyan’s documentary background shines by in her therapy of Armenia as a personality

The primary fiction function from Armenia-born, France-based Tamara Stepanyan is her second movie this yr, after the extremely persona documentary My Armenian Phantoms premiered in Berlin’s Discussion board. This considerate and melancholic drama additionally offers with ghosts of the previous and is knowledgeable by the nation’s historical past of battle – particularly the First Nagorno-Karabakh Struggle between 1992 and 1994, and the effervescent stress within the area that exploded within the Azerbaijani offensive of 2023.

Stepanyan (working with co-writers Jean-Christophe Ferrari, Jean Breschand, Romy Coccia di Ferro and Jihane Chouaib), invitations the viewer to retrace Arto’s footsteps alongside Celine whereas studying one thing alongside the way in which. It’s a contemplative and humanistic selection for Locarno’s opening movie, which is more likely to ring a bell with audiences on the lookout for extra cerebral fare. In distribution phrases, it’s going to little doubt be helped by the internationally recognised Name My Agent! star Cottin and the presence of 2022 Cannes finest actress winner Zar Amir (Holy Spider) in assist.

Celine will get her first shock on the register workplace, when she is instructed her deceased husband Arto Saryan by no means existed. His private particulars do, nonetheless, match one other identify of their books, that of Arto Santrosian. Celine is confronted with additional revelations after looking those that as soon as knew Arto – together with the assertion he was a military deserter.

Stepanyan lets her characters drive a story that takes its time to determine the course of journey, lending the motion a naturalistic really feel. As Celine tries to deal with the invention, she crosses paths with Arsine (Amir), a French-speaking Armenian whose father nonetheless lives within the contested Karabakh area. Arsine presents each a sympathetic ear and the potential for attending to Aghdam, the place the place the episode that led Arto to abandon unfolded.

The director’s ruminative and rangy method permits characters to come back and go, together with Shant Hovhannisyan as a sympathetic taxi driver, Babken Chobanyan as Arsine’s war-wounded associate, and Denis Lavant in a late arriving however arresting cameo as a warfare veteran. There’s additionally a major second throughout a minibus journey, when Celine’s fellow passenger sings alongside to a rap tune on the radio, ’Hascen Im Nuynn A’ (’My Deal with Is The Identical’), which is about displacement and the need to return. The passenger is performed by the rapper himself Valeri Lyoka Ghazaryan – who information as Lyoka and is well-known in Armenia – an Artsakh native whose household fled the 1992 combating in actual life, including a delicate additional poignancy to the scene.

Cottin and Amir navigate each the power and fragility of their characters with care – Celine tries to come back to phrases with what has been misplaced, whereas Arsine focuses on making an attempt to avoid wasting her nation’s future. Elsewhere, Stepanyan’s documentary background shines by in her therapy of Armenia as a personality in its personal proper. The camerawork from Claire Mathon (Portrait Of A Girl On Fireplace, Spencer) is attentive, not simply to the delicate shifts in Cottin and Amir’s performances however to the landscapes and environments by which the pair go – from a goldfish bowl and dog-eared submitting on the register workplace, to the forests and mountains en path to Karabakh. 

Stepanyan additionally just isn’t afraid to take a threat or two, main us into Celine’s headspace and imagined interactions along with her husband’s ‘spirit’ with restraint and magnificence. Laying ghosts to relaxation will not be straightforward in a battle zone, however Stepanyan means that understanding the previous might assist the residing discover peace.