Mes fantômes arméniens

As a child, Tamara Stepanyan came across Armenian cinema on television in the living room with the whole family. Her mother was a virtuoso cellist, her father a famous actor from the 1970s onwards: Vigen Stepanyan often acted in the films that Tamara watched on TV. Taking this first astonishing discovery as its starting point, the film describes growing up in an artistic, critical family in the years in which the Soviet Union was disintegrating. The family emigrates to Lebanon, gains distance, suffers and yearns; Tamara studies directing. With selected film excerpts from Armenia’s cinematic legacy ranging from Sergei Parajanov to Artavazd Peleshyan and far beyond, she approaches both her own path as a woman as well as to film. She allows her account to transcend the personal and shows the patterns and idiosyncrasies of the largely unknown (Soviet) Armenian cinema by linking together family videos and film historical footage. Her fourth feature-length work begins as an invitation au voyage for the audience and ultimately becomes a tender, intimate dialogue with her father, who died in 2020. “Do you remember, Dad?” The cardiogram of a utopia. A séance.