Armenia gets the Cannes treatment: Critics' Week turns its Next Step lens on a country at a crossroads
Cannes' parallel Critics' Week will devote its 2026 Next Step program to Armenian filmmakers, a small but deliberate signal about who the festival wants on the global cinema map.
On 17 July 2026, Variety revealed the slate for the next edition of Cannes' Critics' Week Next Step program, and for the first time the spotlight falls on a single country: Armenia. Three filmmakers, Armik Israyelyan, Raffi Movsisyan, and a third name flagged in Variety's exclusive reporting, will take part in the workshop, the kind of talent-pipeline initiative that has, in past editions, helped launch careers that subsequently travelled the festival circuit from Locarno to Rotterdam.
Why a country focus, and why Armenia? The critics' sidebar at Cannes has long used Next Step as a finishing school for first- and second-time directors from regions that the global festival circuit tends to under-programme. Putting the spotlight on Armenia is, in that sense, both a programming choice and a small geopolitical act: it signals that the festival sees a national cinema worth investing institutional weight in, at a moment when Armenia itself is mid-pivot, balancing a delicate peace process with Azerbaijan, a complicated security relationship with Moscow, and a growing diaspora cultural footprint in France and the United States.
What Next Step actually does
Critics' Week, founded in 1962 as the parallel sidebar to the main Cannes competition, runs Next Step as a year-long mentorship. The chosen filmmakers typically bring a project in development, work with international tutors, and present the results at the following year's festival. The program's alumni roster reads like a Who's Who of the 2010s art-house circuit; for younger filmmakers, a Next Step credit is, in practical terms, an opening of doors to European public-funding bodies and international sales agents.
The Armenian edition slots neatly into that logic. The country's film industry has historically punched above its weight relative to its size: a generation trained at the VGIK-adjacent Soviet tradition, a robust documentary scene, and a small but committed cohort of directors working in France. Critics' Week is, in effect, choosing to amplify that pipeline.
The Armenian cinema moment
Three filmmakers from a country of roughly three million people is, by Cannes standards, a serious commitment. The move comes against a backdrop of state-level cultural diplomacy: Yerevan has, in recent years, opened a permanent pavilion at international markets and leaned into co-production treaties with France. Critics' Week's bet suggests the bet is paying off, or at least that the festival's programmers see a wave worth catching.
There is, inevitably, a softer-power reading too. Armenia sits at a faultline between Russia, Turkey, Iran, and the wider Caucasus; its cultural output carries political freight that filmmakers from more insulated European markets do not. A Critics' Week program focused on Armenia is, in that sense, a quiet piece of European cultural positioning.
What to watch for next
The proof of value will be in 2027. If the projects developed through Next Step travel the festival circuit next summer and pick up co-production deals, the program will be vindicated and other small national cinemas (Georgia, perhaps, or Moldova) will get their turn. If the projects stay domestic, the program risks looking more like a diplomatic gesture than an industrial one.
For now, the headline is small but unambiguous: Cannes' critics' sidebar has decided that Armenian cinema deserves the kind of attention it has, historically, given to Latin American, Filipino, and Eastern European new waves. The question is whether the industry follows.
How Monexus framed this: the wire line is a Cannes-tat item. We treated it as a small but legible signal about who European cultural institutions are investing in, and why.