Yerevan spent Sunday soaked. Vardavar, the water festival that Armenians have celebrated in one form or another since before Christianity arrived, suspended the city’s usual rules for a day. Buckets flew from balconies, children ambushed strangers at Swan Lake, and nobody, from taxi drivers to government officials, held immunity. By evening the streets were drying in the summer heat.
Then the lights went down. The 23rd Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival has taken over the same week, running through July 19, and for the next several days the city trades one collective ritual for another. The succession is worth pausing on. Vardavar, absorbed by the Armenian Church into the Feast of the Transfiguration, began as a pagan devotion to Astghik, the goddess of water, love, and beauty. Cinema, at its best, performs its own transfiguration, turning light on a wall into memory and feeling. One ritual works with water, the other with light. Both ask an entire city to participate, and both insist that strangers share the experience.
A Festival That Grew Into an Institution
The Golden Apricot was founded in 2004 by film director Harutyun Khachatryan together with film critics Mikayel Stamboltsyan and Susanna Harutyunyan, three people who believed that a country with Parajanov and Peleshian in its cinematic bloodline deserved an international festival of its own. The name refers to the fruit whose Latin designation, prunus armeniaca, translates as the Armenian plum, and whose color glows on the lower band of the national flag. Twenty-two editions later, the festival has become the fixed point around which Armenia’s cultural summer turns. As Deputy Minister Tigran Virabyan noted at the pre-festival press conference, friends and colleagues from the diaspora plan their June and July around the question of when the Golden Apricot will take place.
The numbers this year suggest an event in good health. Around 600 applications arrived from 90 countries, of which 90 films from 40 countries made the program. Screenings are being held at the Cinema House and the Moscow and Nairi cinemas. The festival’s international standing received a further boost in December, when the Doc Alliance network, which unites seven of Europe’s key documentary festivals including CPH:DOX, DOK Leipzig, and Visions du Réel, named the Golden Apricot its guest festival for 2026.
Opening With a Ghost Story About Armenia Itself
The choice of opening film could hardly be more fitting. In the Land of Arto, the fiction debut of France-based Armenian documentarian Tamara Stepanyan, arrives in Yerevan after opening the 78th Locarno Film Festival on the Piazza Grande last August. The French-Armenian co-production stars Camille Cottin and Zar Amir Ebrahimi and follows Céline, a Frenchwoman who arrives in Armenia to legalize the death of her husband Arto, only to discover he had been lying about his identity. Set largely in Gyumri, the film unfolds as a journey through the country’s layered griefs, from the 1988 earthquake to the wars of the 1990s and 2020. Stepanyan has described it as a story about collective trauma and the necessity of mourning, which takes time.
A festival that calls itself a crossroads of cultures and civilizations opening with a film in which a French outsider learns to read Armenia is almost too neat. It also signals confidence. Rather than an imported prestige title, the festival opens with an Armenian story told for the world, one that premiered on one of Europe’s most visible screens.
The Competitions: From Kabul to Tbilisi to Yerevan’s Own Shorts
The International Competition gathers twelve features. Armenian audiences will pay particular attention to Outliving Shakespeare by Inna Sahakyan and Ruben Ghazaryan, the home entry in a lineup that stretches from Shahrbanoo Sadat’s No Good Man to Father by Slovak director Tereza Nvotová and The Currents by Argentine-Swiss filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler. A familiar name returns as well. Georgian director George Ovashvili, whose The Other Bank took the top prize in 2009, competes with The Moon is a Father of Mine.
The Regional Competition, the section that most clearly defines the Golden Apricot’s identity as a festival of Western Asia, is arguably the strongest strand this year. It includes Dry Leaf by Alexandre Koberidze, the Georgian director who charmed international critics with What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, alongside Kamal Aljafari’s With Hasan in Gaza, Iranian entries including Amir Azizi’s Inside Amir, and A Fire There by Marlene Edoyan. Few festivals anywhere assemble Georgian, Iranian, Palestinian, Egyptian, and Armenian cinema in a single competitive frame, and that is precisely the point.
The Apricot Stone competition presents ten Armenian short films, a generational snapshot that runs from Ovsanna Gevorgyan’s Paid Mourners to Vahan Khachatryan’s Kafka. For a national industry still small in volume, this section has become the festival’s seedbed, the place where names surface years before their first features.
Juries and Guests: Hausner, Kalari, Pawlikowski
The festival has assembled serious authority to judge all this. The International Competition jury is presided over by Jessica Hausner, a leading figure of contemporary Austrian cinema whose films have premiered in Cannes and Venice. The Regional Competition jury is headed by Mahmoud Kalari, one of Iranian cinema’s most celebrated cinematographers. Kalari’s camera work on A Separation helped carry Asghar Farhadi’s film to the Oscar, and his presence continues the festival’s long, productive intimacy with Iranian cinema. A FIPRESCI jury of international critics judges the regional section in parallel.
The guest list carries its own weight. Pawel Pawlikowski, the Oscar-winning Polish director, will present his new film Fatherland to the Yerevan audience during the festival week and the French-Armenian actor, playwright, and director Simon Abkarian is attending as the festival's guest of honor. Yerevan audiences can even see Abkarian on the festival's own screens, in the role of General de Gaulle in Antonin Baudry's De Gaulle: The Sovereign Edge, which screens among the Yerevan Premieres. Beyond the red carpet, the non-competitive sections offer Yerevan Premieres of festival titles from Cannes and Berlin, national spotlights under the Made in France and Made in Germany banners, and the Twisted Apricot strand for genre cinema. This year’s poster, by the designer Igor Gurovich, is dedicated to poetry.
The industry side runs in parallel. GAIFF Pro, the festival’s financing, co-production, and educational platform, hosts pitching sessions, project and work-in-progress markets, and one-on-one meetings for Regional documentary, fiction, hybrid, and animation projects. For regional filmmakers who cannot easily reach Cannes or Berlin markets, this week in Yerevan is often where projects find their footing.
Transfiguration, Twice
Vardavar survives because it never needed explanation. You were drenched, you laughed, and for a moment the city belonged to everyone equally. The Golden Apricot has spent twenty-three editions building something similar out of darkness and projected light, a week in which Yerevan becomes briefly and genuinely a world capital, where an Afghan director, an Iranian cinematographer, a Polish Oscar winner, and a Gyumri ghost story share the same few blocks between Moscow Cinema and the Cinema House. Sunday’s water dried quickly. The light stays on through the week.
