The 21st Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival, running from 7 to 14 July this year, opened with Atom Egoyan’s latest work, Seven Veils, about a theatre director whose repressed trauma resurfaces as she returns to the opera world after many years. The Canadian-Armenian director is also presiding over the jury of the Apricot Stone Short Film Competition, accompanied by the Russian film critic in exile Anton Dolin and Egyptian film critic Ahmed Shawky, who is currently acting as the president of FIPRESCI.

"This year's festival is particularly significant as we pay tribute to the monumental legacies of Charles Aznavour and Sergei Parajanov", enthused Karen Avetisyan, artistic director of the festival, highlighting this special focus within the programme. "Their contributions haven’t only shaped film and culture but have also emphasised the resilience and richness of Armenian artistry. We are proud to honour their centenaries in an event that is, itself, a testament to the enduring power of film to transcend boundaries and unite diverse voices". The festival is also hosting selected retrospectives with highlights from the filmographies of Iranian director Jafar Panahi and one of the leading names in American independent cinema, Alexander Payne, who’s also the head of the International Competition Jury. Among this year’s guests of honour is US actor Kevin Spacey, offering an occasion for the screening of Alan Parker’s mystery thriller The Life of David Gale (2003), starring Spacey in the main role.

Besides Payne, the International Feature Film Competition also includes the former head of the French Cinematheque Peter Scarlet, American documentary-maker Alexandria Bombach, and contemporary Western Armenian literature luminary Krikor Beledian, Eight of the eleven titles in the competition line-up are European productions and co-productions, namely David Boaretto’s April in France [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] (France), Filippa Reis’s Légua [+lire aussi :
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interview : Filipa Reis, João Miller G…
fiche film] (Portugal), Ninna Pálmadóttir’s Solitude [+lire aussi :
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interview : Ninna Pálmadóttir
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interview : Mika Gustafson
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interview : Noaz Deshe
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Five European productions and co-productions can be found among the ten titles gracing the Regional Panorama Competition, focused on the Western Asia area including the Caucasus and the Middle East: Faraz Fesharaki’s What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov? [+lire aussi :
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interview : Faraz Fesharaki
fiche film] (Germany), Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film [+lire aussi :
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interview : Kamal Aljafari
fiche film] (Palestine/Germany/Qatar/Brazil), Farah Kassem’s We Are Inside [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] (Lebanon/Qatar/Denmark), Farahnaz Sharifi’s My Stolen Planet [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] (Iran/Germany), and Mahdi Fleifel’s To a Land Unknown [+lire aussi :
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interview : Mahdi Fleifel
fiche film] (Greece/Denmark/UK/Netherlands/Palestine). Other notable highlights in the line-up include Georgian filmmaker Maka Gogaladze’s personal documentary Ever Since I Knew Myself [+lire aussi :
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fiche film], which premiered earlier this year at the Visions du Réel Film Festival, and the Canadian-Georgian queer science fiction co-production Gamodi, by Felix Kalmenson, which follows a drag queen and a drifting teenager in rundown Tbilisi.

Last but not least, the festival will close with a screening of the restored version of the 1991 Armenian documentary The Boogeyman, also known as Bobo, by Narine Mkrtchyan and Arsen Azatyan, which depicts the final days of Sergei Parajanov, including his emotional attitude and his difficult relationship with his own particular reality.