The 79th Cannes Film Festival will screen five newly restored films by Armenian director Artavazd Peleshyan (also transliterated Pelechian) in its Cannes Classics section, premiering as part of a dedicated program titled “Pelechian Project,” running May 12 to May 23, 2026, reports the Armenian Film Society.
The program will present restored versions of “Land of the People” (1966), “The Beginning” (1967), “We” (1969), “The Inhabitants” (1970), and “Seasons” (1975). Peleshyan himself will attend the screenings.
Born in 1938 in Leninakan, now Gyumri, and trained at VGIK in Moscow, Peleshyan is widely considered one of the great formal innovators of twentieth-century cinema. He developed a filmmaking method he calls distance montage, a theory of editing in which linked or repeated images are separated across a film so they reverberate against one another over time, in deliberate counterpoint to the dialectical montage tradition of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. His work is unhurried, near wordless, and rooted in Armenian life and landscape, while reaching toward subjects as universal as labor, migration, and the relationship between human beings and the natural world. The French critic Serge Daney described him as a missing link in the true history of cinema. Sergei Parajanov called him one of the few authentic geniuses in the world of cinema. Jean-Luc Godard became one of his most vocal champions and pursued an aborted feature collaboration with him in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 2020, the Fondation Cartier in Paris devoted his first French solo exhibition to him, titled “La Nature,” accompanied by the world premiere of his eponymous film.
The restorations were produced by Coproduction Office in partnership with the Cineteca di Bologna and carried out under Peleshyan’s own supervision. The 4K scanning was completed at the Public Television Company of Armenia, with the exception of “The Inhabitants,” which was scanned in 2K at Belarusfilm in Minsk. Restoration and color grading were handled by the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna. The project was completed in association with the Cinema Foundation of Armenia, the Public Television Company of Armenia, VGIK, and Belarusfilm, with additional support from ZDF/ARTE, ArMa Media Production LLC, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The French distributor is Potemkine Films.
Established in 2004, the Cannes Classics section presents films in restored versions and pays homage to the work of rights-holders, cinematheques, production companies, and national archives that preserve cinema heritage worldwide. This year’s edition is dedicated to the memory of Dean Tavoularis, the legendary production designer of “The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now,” and “Bonnie and Clyde,” who died in Paris on April 22 at the age of 93.
