The discovery of a loved one’s hidden truths after their death could serve as the plot for a psychological thriller, and that’s definitely what the first third of In the Land of Arto [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] feels like. But as the story unfolds, nothing turns out to be as straightforward as it first appears, and since it all takes place in Armenia, conflict can hardly be confined to interpersonal relationships alone. War trauma inevitably plays a role, but despite the tragic circumstances that lead the protagonist, Arto, into the shadows and towards suicide, the atrocities remain unseen by the audience, with their discovery left to an “outsider.” On the one hand, this somewhat distanced approach to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict — which formally ended in late 2023 with Armenia losing the ancient region of Artsakh —helps to process collective trauma on a symbolic level and, on the other, it heightens awareness of this fierce conflict which isn’t much discussed around the world. And it’s Tamara Stepanyan’s respectable achievement of crafting a universal fable about secrets and lies, which is nonetheless deeply embedded in an authentic local context, which resulted in In the Land of Arto bagging the opening slot in the Locarno Film Festival and enjoying a packed screening in the world’s largest open-air cinema, the famous Piazza Grande.

The out-of-the-shadows protagonist, followed closely by the camera, is Arto’s French wife, Céline (Camille Cottin), who arrives in Armenia to search for papers in order to arrange Armenian citizenship for their two children after Arto’s death. But as her husband doesn’t appear in any registers under the name by which she knows him, and given that numerous other details she believed herself familiar with don’t seem to add up, she eventually abandons a formal approach and plunges into local realities in an attempt to piece together the puzzle of Arto’s past as a soldier, when she only knew him as a peaceful engineer. The initial shock of not really knowing the man she loved and believed herself to be happy with is gradually replaced by an understanding that acceptance of the other means to allow them an undisclosed backstory, especially if the latter is too painful to reveal. “You probably were very happy”, her accidentally encountered local guide, Arsine (Zar Amir Ebrahimi), reassures her, not only leading Céline through a wounded land, but also fostering an initiation through a perspective shift: sometimes, the past is so unbearable that the only way to carry on living is to bury it, until it inevitably resurfaces.

After her confessional autobiographical documentary My Armenian Phantoms, Tamara Stepanyan is continuing to “scan” the Armenian soul and sketch a comprehensive portrait from afar, this time through the outsider eyes of French character Céline who is fatally attracted to the land. “I no longer live in Armenia, but it haunts me like an amputated limb, living inside me like a ghost,” the filmmaker admits in her director’s note. Yet despite creating a film accessible to foreign audiences, Stepanyan doesn’t exoticize her homeland; instead, she discovers Armenia along with viewers, before our very eyes, by choosing the less visually exposed town of Gyumri as the film’s setting, and by casting local theatre actors as Arno’s battlefield comrades, encouraging them to act like real-life soldiers. Meanwhile, in the finale – which pieces together fragmented memories and resurrects terrifying scenes – Denis Lavant’s anonymous, half-mad war witness embodies the wide-reaching resonance of war-based trauma.

In the Land of Arto was produced by French firms La Huit and Pan Cinéma, and co-produced by Armenia’s Visan. International sales are handled by Belgium’s Be For Films.