Tamara Stepanyan has opened this year's Locarno Film Festival with her first fiction feature, In the Land of Arto. But this notable success comes on the heels of a 15-year-long career in documentary cinema. Born in Yerevan and based in Paris, after living and studying cinema in Beirut and specialising in Copenhagen, she blends autobiography, archive footage and philosophical inquiry to address identity in exile and histories and societies of Armenia and her adopted countries. In My Armenian Phantoms, screening in IDFA Best of Fests, she enters a dialogue with her father, a famous actor, drawing on film classics, documentaries and home videos to tell the story of her home country. In Village of Women (2022), she intimately depicts women living in a village without men who are working in Russia. In Those from the Shore (2017), she films Armenian asylum seekers in France who are in a limbo due to the indifference of the country's refugee policy. Her first feature-length documentary, Embers (2012) is a tribute to her grandmother and a dialogue between two distant generations that uncovers the history of post-war Armenia.

Hosted by LaScam

Moderator: Neil Young

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