Two Armenian films were featured at this year’s Berlinale, marking a rare milestone. Sona Karapoghosyan explores their significance, the shifting politics of international film festivals, and how Armenian cinema navigates recognition, identity and the quiet constraints of global cultural power.

With a spotlight on Sean Baker’s film "Anora" that won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival this year, Sona Karapoghosyan examines how evolving yet often reductive depictions in American cinema shape perceptions and cultural narratives about Armenians.

Blending the two worlds of theater and cinema, Atom Egoyan’s new film “Seven Veils”—named for the biblical character Salome whose seductive dancing earns her the severed head of John the Baptist—portrays Salome not as a cruel femme fatale but as a victim.

An Armenian film, “1489” won the Main Jury and the International Federation of Film Critics prizes at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam in 2023 amid upheaval and controversy that triggered a series of withdrawals and boycotts of the festival for its perceived silence regarding Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

Major film festivals don’t only showcase films for local and international cinephiles, they also create opportunities for unknown stories, names and voices to be heard. Sona Karapoghosyan writes about how the Cannes Film Festival is trying to tell the stories of everyone, not only ones from the West.

The directors of the documentary “5 Dreamers and a Horse” manage to think outside of genre limitations, and to blend the elements of magical realism and cinéma vérité to create a strange fairy tale that resembles the one in which we all live.

Michael Goorjian’s feature film “Amerikatsi” succeeded in infusing a sentimental and “positivist” tone inherent to Hollywood cinema within an Armenian reality, writes film critic Sona Karapoghosyan.

Garegin Papoyan’s film “Bon Voyage” manages to recreate a Kafkaesque world in the form of the Stepanakert Airport, where people follow a seemingly unreasonable system, and continue to do their work with incredible persistence, without questioning its meaning.

In this review of the film “It Is Spring” dedicated to the Artsakh conflict, Sona Karapoghosyan writes that cinema should be a tool for critically revealing and interpreting the world, and not a bandage to hide our collective complexes and fears.