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Prominent Armenian filmmaker, screenwriter and film theorist Artavazd Peleshyan celebrates his 86th birthday anniversary on Wednesday 22 February.

He is renowned for developing a style of cinematographic perspective known as distance montage, combining perception of depth with oncoming entities, such as running packs of antelope or hordes of humans. Filmmaker Sergei Parajanov called Peleshyan "one of the few authentic geniuses in the world of cinema". Peleshyan was awarded the title of Merited Artist of the Armenian SSR in 1979 and Merited Artist of the Russian Federation in 1995.

Peleshyan's films have been described as being on the border between a documentary and a feature film, somewhat reminiscent of the work of such avant-garde filmmakers as Bruce Conner, rather than of conventional documentaries. However, it has been noted that his work, unlike Maya Deren's, is not firmly within the avant-garde, and that it does not try to explore the absurd. Peleshyan's films have been summarized as "a poetic view of life transferred onto film."

He has made extensive use of archive footage, mixed in with his own shots, with fast inter-cutting between the two. Telephoto lenses are often used to get "candid camera" shots of people engaging in mundane tasks.

Most of Peleshyan's films are short, ranging from 6 to about 60 minutes long, and feature no dialogue. However, music and sound effects play nearly as important a role in his films as the visual images in contributing towards the artistic whole. Nearly all of his films were shot in black-and-white.

Artavazd Peleshyan's most significant film is considered, by many critics, to be The Seasons (1975), shot by cinematographer Mikhail Vartanov. It is a look at the contradiction and harmony between humans and nature and was the last collaboration between Peleshian and Vartanov, Armenia's two most important documentary auteurs, who first worked together on The Autumn Pastoral (1971).

Peleshyan is also the author of a range of theoretical works, such as his 1988 book My Cinema.

Being from a country removed from internationally significant cinema circles, Peleshyan's efforts were not initially well-recognized by critics of world cinema. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, he has made two more short films, Life (1993) and The End (1994). He is now living in Moscow. His most recent film, Nature (French: La nature), was edited at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in 2005-2006 and had its world premiere in 2020.