Prompted by conversations with his late father, actor Vigen Stepanian (1952–2021), the director embarks on an emotional journey into the forgotten history of Armenian cinema. Weaving personal loss with a nation’s cinematic heritage, this documentary resurrects images and memories obscured by time. Rich archival scenes blend with the filmmaker's intimate recordings, inviting viewers to reconsider the artistic and cultural legacy of Armenian film. The result is a multilayered essay on how private memory transforms into collective history—a restoration of memory through cinema itself.​

 Armenia is a nation with more of its people abroad than within its borders. A history of forced migration and genocide created a vast diaspora, while the political upheavals following the Soviet Union’s collapse left national memory on precarious ground.

In her new film, Tamara Stepanyan builds a cinematic essay from the archives of Armenian cinema, tracing fragments of history that have vanished or been excluded. For Stepanyan—daughter of a celebrated actor—this heritage is both a repository of collective memory and a deeply personal source. After her father’s sudden death, she attempts a dialogue with his ghost and with the collective ghosts of a nearly forgotten national cinema.

Weaving her own home movies with images from more than thirty masterpieces of Soviet-era Armenian filmmaking, she summons the spirit of an art that persevered through censorship and exile. In many ways, her family’s story mirrors that of the Armenian people. This lyrical meditation on the interplay between personal and collective memory shows how cinema can carry grief, identity, and love across generations.

 My Armenian Phantoms is a film about my dialogue with the ghosts of Armenian cinema, following the free and subjective path of my memories, emotions and thoughts. A film in which I try to capture the traces, the embers, the few glimmers of light that continue, despite everything, to shine.

• ProducerCeline LOISEAU, Alice BALDO, Tamara STEPANYAN, Milena POYLO, Gilles SACUTO
• Screenplay Tamara STEPANYAN, Jean-christophe FERRARI
• Cinematography Claire MATHON
• Edit Olivier FERRARI
• Sound Jocelyn ROBERT
• Music Cynthia ZAVEN

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