In Le Pays d’Arto, Franco-Armenian filmmaker Tamara Stepanyan makes her fiction debut with a story that navigates between personal loss and the wounds of a nation. The film, which opened the 2025 Locarno Film Festival, presents a seemingly simple plot: Céline, a French woman, travels to Armenia after the sudden death of her husband Arto to arrange citizenship for their children. However, the journey soon becomes a deep exploration of the man she thought she knew — and of the collective pain of a country marked by war, diaspora, and silence.
The narrative begins with the tone of a psychological thriller. Céline, played with emotional restraint by Camille Cottin, discovers that much of what she knew about her husband doesn’t add up. His name does not appear in official records, and his past as a peaceful engineer starts to unravel, revealing signs of a much darker and more complex history: that of a former soldier, scarred by the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. What could have evolved into a predictable tale of marital secrets shifts instead toward the collective. The camera — observant yet restrained — follows Céline through a wounded, non-touristic Armenia, particularly in the city of Gyumri, a rarely depicted location in contemporary cinema. Along the way, she encounters characters who shed new light on Arto’s hidden identity, among them Arsine, a young woman who embodies both the rage and resilience of a generation born between unresolved wars.
Stepanyan’s approach doesn’t linger only on personal drama. Through Céline’s grief, the director offers a reflection on the legacy of trauma and the impossibility of reducing identity to an official biography. Arto didn’t merely hide his past; he buried it in order to survive — until that past returned with such force that it led him to take his own life. In this sense, the film suggests that some silences are not deceptions but survival mechanisms.
Visually, Le Pays d’Arto stands out for its restrained and sensitive cinematography by Claire Mathon, which lends the landscapes an emotional, almost spiritual depth. Nonetheless, the film is not without its uneven moments. Some scenes — such as the final appearance of a traumatized soldier played by Denis Lavant — feel disconnected from the film’s main narrative flow. Still, these detours do not detract from the overall impact.
Tamara Stepanyan, with a solid background in documentary filmmaking, brings to fiction her attentive gaze on detail, memory, and territory. Céline’s story becomes a powerful metaphor for what it means to inhabit a land that belongs to you only through someone else — and how even in absence, there are stories that demand to be told. Le Pays d’Arto is not just a film about grief, but also an open question about identity, belonging, and truth.
