OPEN CALLS: Green Film Lab - Budapest, TFL Co-Production Fund & TFL Next - Feature Film
Projects
Barzagh
Two women, a driver and a dead body embark on a journey in search of a final burial ground across the Central Asian landscape.
Three women, two alive – Tursun and Nigora, and one dead – Lutfia, are driven by Ravshan, lost for three days and three nights along roads, cities, wastelands, steppes and mountains. The three are in a hope to deliver Lutfia’s body to her burial ground - a remote village where her husband awaits. The trip unfolds as a discovery of the last wish of Lutfia, while her sister, Tursun, gradually realizes that she is going against the ultimate will of the deceased. At the same time Tursun witnesses a strange bound that happens on the road between Nigora and Ravshan, which becomes another test for Tursun. Barzagh is “a cold sleep” between death and resurrection, where the dead awakes and the living dies. The journey becomes a trial not only for Lutfia, but rather for the three living souls that are imprisoned in a car that takes them further and further to a destination that slowly disappears.
In 1999, my aunt Lutfia came from the southern village and died in my hands. It was my first experience of death so close. Barzagh is an intimate story of my family that can be applied to wider thoughts about one’s homeland, identity or final destination on this earth. The journey across more than one thousand kilometers through all Central Asian landscapes will give me a chance to explore and document traces of my own past, while trying to comprehend the borderlines of its unknown future. The subject of death has always been one of the most intriguing subjects for me. Responsibility for one’s personal deeds, communal tasks and the idea of self-annihilation based on Islamic understanding of afterlife is a driving force of the project, which creates a rich environment to bring my characters to life. Barzagh pretends to embrace and travel along the land that once was known as Turkistan, right before the Soviet period. Barzagh is a story about human relation to its roots and nature.
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