Overview

• In the Land of Arto opened the 2025 Locarno Film Festival on August 7 with a sold-out screening on the Piazza Grande.
• The debut fiction feature follows Céline (Camille Cottin), a French widow uncovering her late husband’s hidden past as an Armenian soldier to symbolically process war trauma.
• Stepanyan cast local Gyumri State Theatre actors alongside non-actors inspired by real veterans she met in Sevan to ground the story in authentic Armenian experiences.
• The film blends scripted drama with documentary elements to raise global awareness of the underreported Nagorno-Karabakh conflict through an outsider’s perspective.
• She will begin editing in January on a new documentary filmed at Paris’s Maison des Femmes about survivors of domestic violence, while developing an Armenia-set fiction with co-writer Romy Coccia di Ferro.