My Armenian Phantoms

My Armenian Phantoms / Mes fantômes arméniens

Tamara Stepanyan, France, Armenia, Qatar, 2025, 75’

A vivid journey through the forgotten world of Armenian cinema explores a tradition that offered some of the most visually stunning and thematically powerful works of its time.

In the film, the author embarks on an evocative journey through the forgotten world of Armenian cinema. Sparked by a dialogue with her now deceased father, renowned Armenian actor Vigen Stepanyan, this captivating documentary brings to life the vibrant and often overlooked history interwoven with personal loss. Drawing on a rich tapestry of archival footage and her own memories, the film reveals a profound cultural and artistic legacy to new audiences. It captures not just Soviet Armenian cinema, but the enduring soul of Armenian storytelling – its beauty, its struggles, and its unyielding spirit.

“My father’s disappearance opened the doors of the past wide for me. The Armenian past. And the past of cinema. Both intimately linked. As I began to dialogue with his ghost, as I began to search for and collecttraces of his past career, as I began to revisit the films he starred in, I came across other ghosts from the history of Armenian cinema. It was as if my father’s ghost had taken me by the hand and led me into a circle of ghosts linked, in one way or another, to the world of cinema. Hence the desire to tell the story of this cinema, little known abroad, in a film. To offer a personal cinematic journey through the history of Armenian cinema. A cinema organically linked to a political, social and cultural universe that has now disappeared: the Soviet Union.” – Tamara Stepanyan

Tamara Stepanyan was born in Armenia, moved to Lebanon in the early 1990s and continued her studies at the National Film School of Denmark. She now lives in France and is with her documentary opus and her first fiction film considered to be the new voice of contemporary Armenian film.