N/C 14+ HOMEWARD
2019 | Dir Nariman Aliev | 96 mins | Ukraine

Mustafa (Akhtem Seitablayev) and his college-aged son, Alim (Remzi Bilyalov) have set out to a morgue in Kyiv to recover the body of Alim’s older brother, Nazim, yet another casualty of the war with Russia. Although Nazim had been living in Kyiv with his Orthodox wife, Oleysa, Mustafa is insistent that his son is given a traditional Muslim burial beside his mother’s grave in Crimea, and excludes Oleysa from the road-trip.
Mustafa is a hot-tempered and severe. There is also tension between father and son as city-life has exacerbated the generational gap between Mustafa and Alim. However, one commonality unites them – their shared language of Crimean Tatar. Along the way, they face many obstacles, not least of which is a decomposing cadaver, and Alim is hard-pressed to accept his father’s determination to uphold tradition at all costs. However, the on-going challenges encourage the pair to better understand each other and profoundly impacts their relationship.
Ukrainian, Crimean Tatar and Russian with English subtitles.

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Available to watch for 48 hours after purchase.
Distributor: New Wave Films – no account required.

“Masterfully shot, this film is simultaneously telling and dialogue-sparse, as the characters switch between four different languages and the even most insignificant objects have a profound narrative purpose”. Maria Muzdybaeva in The Calvert Journal

“An eloquent and deeply felt movie that, dispensing entirely with any music score, conveys a complex of emotions all the more potent for being so starkly and unaffectedly presented.” Philip Kemp, Sight and Sound.

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