My Armenian Phantoms, Armenia’s Oscar submission

Tamara Stepanyan’s My Armenian Phantoms has been selected as Armenia’s Oscar submission for the Best International Feature Film category for the 2026 Academy Awards.

The documentary premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival before touring festivals around the world. My Armenian Phantoms is a tender posthumous letter to the director’s father, Vigen Stepanyan, through archival footage of Soviet Armenian cinema.

Armenia has never been nominated in the Best International Documentary category.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences will announce shortlists on December 16, followed by nominations on January 22.

The Academy Awards will be held on Sunday, March 15 at the Dolby Theatre.

Le Giornate del Cinema Muto

Next date for the Palestine, a revised narative performance will be at the world’s leading international silent-film festival, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, in Pordenone, Italy. The performance will take place at the Teatro Verdi on October 8, 2025.

For more info about the festival and the performance, please click here

Madrigal d'essilio in Stuttgart

Madrigal d’essilio, my composition for the Neue Vocalsolisten is part of the anniversary series where the singers perform their "milestones" from their huge repertoire for their 25th anniversary. The concert will take place at the Stuttgart Theaterhaus on July 27th.

Cine concert at the Barbican cinema and Contact theater

As part of the 8th edition of the Safar Film Festival, I will be performing Palestine, a revised narrative at the Barbican (London) on June 22, and at Contact (Manchester) on June 24th.

For more information on the event, please click here

To enlarge the video, click the square icon in the bottom right

Cine concert at Metropolis Cinema

Live performance at Metropolis cinema

I’ll be performing in Beirut on Monday 20th, as part of the Ecrans du Réel festival, in the refurbished Metropolis cinema in its new location in Beirut.

For more info, please click here

cine concert at Silent Green Berlin

Rehearsals and sound check (video by Rabih el Khoury)

*Post-performance discussion (photo by Nour Sokhon)*

Live performance at Alfilm (Berlin)

I'm looking forward to performing live at this year's edition of Alfilm festival in Berlin, Palestine - A Revised Narrative, a 30 min film I edited from 77 silent short clips shot on 35mm by British Forces in Palestine between 1914 and 1917. A collaboration with Rana Eid (sound design), this visual and sonic essay is a reflection on the British imperial narrative following the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of nation-states in the Middle East.

For more info on schedule and location, please click here

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The Watchman at the International Rotterdam Film Festival

One of my favorite films in recent years that I had the pleasure to compose the music for, will be competing at the Rotterdam Film Festival (IRFF) next month. The Watchman by Ali Cherri, or the poetics of beauty, distance and dreams vs the politics of chauvinism, insanity and wars.

To know more about the screenings at the International Rotterdam Film Festival, please click here

Ways of Vanishing

My video Kingdom (2010-2022) is part of Ways of Vanishing, the BIENALSUR video program curated by Nayla Tamraz (LBN) and Florencia Incarbone (ARG), in view at the Sursock Museum from November 25 till the 29th.

Ways of Vanishing brings together works by filmmakers from the Global South, including Latin America, Lebanon, and Turkey. In four sessions, it proposes an aesthetic exploration of the process of vanishing. This unique condition entails the passage from the visible and existence to invisibility, a change of state that projects itself in multiple directions towards a languid disintegration.
The videos and films gathered herein question the ways in which this evanescent condition can be addressed. A culture, an ecosystem, a nation, a people and even a building may vanish in a given period of time or in an instant, but there are always ways of re-emerging, transforming impermanence into an opportunity for transmutation.

For more info on the video program, please click here

Sonic Matter Festival for experimental music

My video Kingdom (2010-2022) will be screened during the Sonic Matter festival, curated by Katharina Rosenberger & Lisa Nolte. The event will take place from November 30th to December 3rd in Zürich.

The festival includes an online platform where my composition for electronics and voice Human Moments In World War III (2018), is part of an eclectic program featuring leading artists in electronic and experimental music.

For more info on the festival program, please click here

Yellow Bus at the Toronto International Film Festival

In Yellow Bus, Wendy Bednarz’s feature debut, an Indian woman living in the Arabian Gulf embarks on a search for truth and accountability after her daughter is left to die on a school bus in the sweltering desert heat. The film is the first one to be shot in the Indian community of Abu Dhabi and is in Hindi, English, Arabic, Urdu, and Tagalog.

I am happy to have composed the soundtrack of this beautiful film that will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in less than a month.

To know more about the screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival, please click here

Best Music Award

Honored to have received the Best Music Award for the soundtrack of Beirut Hold’em, a film directed by Michel Kammoun, at the Lebanese Movie Awards!

To know more about the festival, click here

Collaboration with ICONEM

Happy to have composed the music for Reminiscence of a Moving City’s Many Stories, a video by Gaël Labousse (ICONEM) for the Sursock Museum in Beirut. ICONEM is an innovative startup that specializes in the digitization of endangered cultural heritage sites in 3D. The video is created out of 30.000 images stitched together in what is considered an outstanding work of contemporary photogrammetry.

In view at the Fouad Debbas Collection Gallery, Level 1 until February 2024.

For more info on the Debbas collection and the video, please click here

Music in Film

Fondation Liban Cinema celebrated Music in Lebanese cinema on Monday April the 24th at the beautiful Fondation Charles Corm with filmmakers and composers.

Filmmaker Vatche Boulghourjian and I (via Zoom) discussed the process of making music for film and our collaboration on recent projects. A conversation moderated by Zeina Saleh Kayali.

CYNTHIA ZAVEN

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