Artavazd Pelechian's Restored Films Screen at New York Film Festival

Eight restored works by Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian were presented at the New York Film Festival in 2026 as part of the Pelechian Project. The director's output is compact: 13 works, mostly shorts, plus two features that each run barely an hour. Apart from Nature in 2019, he has released nothing since 1994. Recognition arrived slowly but has expanded to the point that many of his films now exist in 4K restorations, which debuted at various festivals across 2026. During the 1960s, Pelechian studied at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow alongside peers, where the curriculum covered Soviet giants such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov, figures who defined early cinematography and editing. Pelechian departed from their model and devised what he called "distance montage." Every one of his films relies on montage, built from elaborate shot assemblages held together by specific themes. In a 1990s conversation with Scott MacDonald, Pelechian drew the line between his method and conventional montage, saying that in Eisenstein every element carries meaning, while for him individual fragments no longer mean anything and only the complete film holds meaning. He added that Eisenstein treated editing as a route from here to there, whereas he treats it as a way of seeing where we are. The NYFF program placed eight restored titles before audiences, among them The Seasons, a 1975 work by Pelechian.