Golden Apricot 2026 Opens In Yerevan

Souzian Dispatch Coverage | Yerevan, 12-19 July 2026 | Regional stories from Armenia, Iran, Palestine, Afghanistan, Georgia, and MENA.

Souzian Dispatch will be present at the 23rd Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival to cover films connected to Armenia, Iran, Palestine, Afghanistan, Georgia, and the wider region.

The festival will take place from 12 to 19 July 2026 in Yerevan. This year's edition also arrives in a new industry context, after Golden Apricot joined FIAPF's accredited festival network in 2026. Its official programme brings together the Opening / Closing section, International Competition, Regional Panorama, Apricot Stone, Non-Competition, Retrospective and Tributes.

Golden Apricot 2026 begins with Tamara Stepanyan’s In The Land Of Arto, a France-Armenia production starring Camille Cottin, Zar Amir and Hovnatan Avédikian. The film follows a French woman who arrives in Armenia to legalize the death of her husband and gradually discovers the hidden parts of his past.

Zar Amir’s presence in the opening film gives the festival an immediate connection to Iranian cinema and diaspora performance. It also places the opening night inside a wider conversation about memory, displacement and artists working across borders.

The Opening / Closing section also includes Godfrey Reggio’s Once within a Time, which features Iranian artist Sussan Deyhim among its music and cast credits.

This first Souzian Dispatch report focuses mainly on films in the International Competition and Regional Panorama, where the strongest regional line of the programme appears. These sections include works linked to Iran, Armenia, Palestine, Afghanistan, Georgia, Lebanon, Egypt and North Africa.

Souzian Dispatch Coverage from Yerevan

Armenia

In The Land Of Arto

Director: Tamara Stepanyan
Production: France, Armenia
Section: Opening / Closing

Story:
Céline travels from France to Armenia to complete the legal process around the death of Arto, her husband. What begins as an administrative journey slowly opens into the parts of Arto’s life that he had kept from her.

The film moves through grief, war memory and the difficulty of saying goodbye to someone whose past remains only partly known. Its story is tied to the aftermath of the 2020 battles, where personal loss and national history remain close to each other.

Outliving Shakespeare

Directors: Inna Sahakyan, Ruben Ghazaryan
Production: Armenia, Netherlands
Section: International Competition

Story:
Inside a Soviet-era retirement home, elderly residents rehearse a play built around Shakespeare’s characters.

The rehearsals become part of daily life in the home. Through them, the film observes aging, loneliness, memory and the quiet forms of care that appear between residents.

Here, Elsewhere

Director: Comes Chahbazian
Production: Belgium, Armenia
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
During the 2023 siege of Artsakh, a family keeps filming its daily life as war comes closer.

The camera records ordinary gestures under pressure: waiting, listening, staying inside, trying to continue. The film looks at home as something fragile, held together by routine while danger remains nearby.

Iran

Past Future Continuous

Directors: Morteza Ahmadvand, Firouzeh Khosrovani
Production: Iran, Norway, Italy
Section: International Competition

Story:
Maryam left Iran at the age of twenty and never returned. Years later, cameras placed inside her family home in Tehran allow her to look back at the life she left behind.

The film turns distance into a way of seeing. Through family images, domestic space and remote presence, it reflects on exile, memory and the emotional weight of a home that remains out of reach.

Inside Amir

Director: Amir Azizi
Production: Iran
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
In Tehran, Amir is facing a decision that can change the direction of his life: whether to leave Iran.

The film stays close to his uncertainty rather than turning it into a larger statement. Through Amir’s hesitation, it captures the private pressure behind a question shared by many young Iranians today.

The Westoxicateds

Director: Gilda Pourjabar
Production: Canada, Iran
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
Gilda Pourjabar returns to her teenage years in post-1979 Iran through the memory of forbidden rock music and bootleg cassettes.

The film follows a hidden youth culture shaped by listening, sharing and small acts of rebellion. Music becomes a way to remember a generation that searched for freedom through sounds that were not allowed to circulate openly.

An Incomplete Calendar

Director: Sanaz Sohrabi
Production: Canada, Iran, Turkey, Venezuela
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
A little-known vinyl record made in 1980 for the anniversary of OPEC becomes the starting point for Sanaz Sohrabi’s film.

Through music and archive material, An Incomplete Calendar looks at oil, Palestine liberation and Pan-Arab solidarity during the 1960s and 1970s. The film follows the traces of political imagination left behind in sound.

Palestine

With Hasan In Gaza

Director: Kamal Aljafari
Production: Germany, Palestine, France, Qatar
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
Kamal Aljafari works from MiniDV tapes shot in Gaza in 2001, recently rediscovered after years.

The images move through streets, faces and daily spaces that have since been deeply changed. The film becomes an act of looking again, using archive not as nostalgia, but as a record of a place and a life under threat.

Habibi Hussein

Director: Alex Bakri
Production: Palestine, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Sweden
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
Hussein, a Palestinian projectionist in the West Bank, tries to repair an old cinema projector.

His work is small, physical and patient. Around it, the film builds a story about cinema as a public act, and about the desire to keep a screen alive where movement and gathering are never simple.

Afghanistan

No Good Men

Director: Shahrbanoo Sadat
Production: Germany, France, Norway, Denmark, Afghanistan
Section: International Competition

Story:
Kabul, 2021. Naru works as the only female cameraperson at the city’s main television station, while the Taliban’s return draws closer.

She is trying to protect her work, her child and the life she has built. Around her, public space begins to narrow, especially for women, and everyday choices become harder to separate from fear.

Georgia And The Caucasus

The Moon Is A Father Of Mine

Director: George Ovashvili
Production: Georgia, Germany, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Turkey
Section: International Competition

Story:
In Georgia after independence, twelve-year-old Toma lives in Tbilisi with his grandmother. His father, absent for years, suddenly returns.

The film places a family reunion inside a country still adjusting to political change. Toma’s home becomes a space where personal memory and national transition quietly meet.

A Fire There

Director: Marlene Edoyan
Production: Canada
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
In Gandzani, a remote village in southern Georgia near the Armenian border, an ethnic Armenian community lives close to several histories at once.

Marlene Edoyan’s film observes daily life in this border space, where language, memory and geography shape how people understand where they belong.

Dry Leaf

Director: Alexandre Koberidze
Production: Germany, Georgia
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
Lisa disappears and leaves behind a letter asking others not to look for her. A search begins across Georgian villages.

The film moves through rural landscapes and the spaces left by absence. Its attention rests on movement, uncertainty and the quiet tension of looking for someone who may not want to be found.

Lebanon, Egypt And North Africa

Dream Of Another Summer

Director: Irene Bartolomé
Production: Spain, Lebanon
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
A woman’s physical and emotional collapse unfolds among urban ruins in Lebanon.

The film looks at the body and the city together. Broken spaces, memory and personal crisis become part of the same landscape.

Safe Exit

Director: Mohammed Hammad
Production: Egypt, Libya, Qatar, Tunisia, Germany
Section: Regional Panorama

Story:
Samaan, a young Coptic Christian security guard in Cairo, still carries the trauma of his father’s murder in Libya.

His life is pulled into a dangerous moral situation, where grief and survival begin to shape the choices available to him. The film moves through personal pain and social pressure in contemporary North Africa.

Apricot Stone

Golden Apricot’s Apricot Stone section presents Armenian short films in the 2026 programme.

This first Souzian Dispatch report does not enter the details of the short-film selection, but the section remains part of the festival’s wider structure and may be followed in later coverage.

Bashu, The Little Stranger & Satatango

Tributes

The Tributes section includes Bahram Beyzai’s Bashu, The Little Stranger and Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó.

Beyzai’s restored Iranian classic follows Bashu, a ten-year-old boy from southern Iran whose village is bombed during the war. He hides in a truck and reaches the north of the country, where his skin, accent and language make him an outsider inside his own country. Its presence in the section adds an Iranian work about war, displacement and belonging to this year’s programme.

Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó, based on the novel by László Krasznahorkai, follows the residents of a collapsing agricultural collective in a post-Communist landscape. Its inclusion places one of Tarr’s major works beside the festival’s wider conversation around history, collective life and social fracture.

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Souzian Dispatch will follow selected films from the International Competition, Regional Panorama, Opening / Closing and Tributes sections as part of its Golden Apricot 2026 coverage.

If you are attending Golden Apricot in Yerevan, I would be happy to meet during the festival, exchange notes and hear about films, artists or events that deserve attention. You can follow Souzian Dispatch (@SouzianDispatch) and Abbas Souzian (@AbbasMHosseini) on Instagram for updates throughout the festival, and you are welcome to share suggestions, screening tips or story ideas.

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