78th Locarno Film Festival opened with Tamara Stepanyan’s Le Pays d’Arto

The 2025 Locarno Film Festival’s Piazza Grande program opened with Le Pays d’Arto, the debut of Armenian-French director Tamara Stepanyan.

The screening was the film’s world premiere and the opening film of the 78th Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland.

Set against the backdrop of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict – In the Land of Arto (Le Pays d’Arto) follows the recently widowed Céline (Camille Cottin) on a revelatory journey to the home country of her late husband. Exploring Armenia through the eyes of a French woman, Stepanyan ponders the challenges of being in-between two cultures and finding the right path to understanding and acceptance of the other, according to film critic Sona Karapoghosyan.