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Best modern silent of 2025

Silent London is a community devoted to silent film culture. The Poll is its annual audience-voted survey celebrating achievements in silent cinema, including modern silent films, restorations, festivals, and screenings. It gathers votes from silent film fans, film critics and curators around the world and announces winners each year in various categories such as Best Modern Silent, Best Silent Film Screening and Silent Film Discovery.

This year, Palestine, a revised narrative was voted Best Modern Silent of 2025 in the annual Silent London poll!

To know more about the winners in the different categories, please click here

My Armenian Phantoms, Armenia’s Oscar submission

Tamara Stepanyan’s My Armenian Phantoms has been selected as Armenia’s Oscar submission in both Best International Feature Film and Best documentary categories 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

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

Photo by Jim Mangles

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

Jerusalem, film still, 1917

Metropolis Cinema

cine concert at Silent Green Berlin

Rehearsals and sound check (video by Rabih el Khoury)

Post-performance discussion (photo by Nour Sokhon)

Rehearsals (photo by Rana Eid)

photo by Rabih el Khoury

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

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

Kingdom - video still

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

Kingdom - Video still 2

Kingdom - Video still 1

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

 

© 2014 - 2025 Cynthia Zaven