Hype Studio
First-time writer-director Malika Musaeva is set to make history at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, where her female-centered coming-of-age drama “The Cage Is Looking for a Bird” is the very first Chechen-language movie ever chosen by the age-old German fest.
Musaeva’s launching, which world premieres Feb. 22 in the celebration’s competitive Encounters area and is being repped worldwide by Totem Films, concentrates on a group of Chechen ladies residing in a remote rural town, where they should protect their liberty and the right to live their own lives.
At the movie’s heart is a relationship in between 2 teenage women, played by novice stars Khadizha Bataeva and Madina Akkieva. On the precipice of the adult years, the duo looks for haven in each other as they browse hard choices about their futures.
Born in Grozny, the capital of Russia’s Chechen Republic, Musaeva says she envisaged the movie as a “collection of different experiences, different facts, different destinies,” motivated by the personal histories of relative and good friends and the lots of ladies who surrounded her throughout her life.
The director and her family left Chechnya in 1999, throughout the ruthless Russian campaign to stop a separatist motion in the Muslim-bulk republic, and invested the bulk of her youth on the relocation: in the Russian republic of Ingushetia, then Ukraine, then Germany, prior to she went back to Russia. There she would go on to pursue a degree in movie and research study in the prominent directing workshop developed by Alexander Sokurov.
Musaeva then went back to Germany to continue her research studies, registering in a master’s program in Hamburg and, after finishing, composing a script about the experiences of Chechen refugees in Europe. But German broadcasters and moneying bodies weren’t responsive to what one referred to as a “kitchen drama” concentrated on the interior lives of individuals residing on the fringes of German society.
Those rejections, nevertheless, marked a turning point for the young director, who was approached by her coach Sokurov about making a very first function — and to do it, no less, in her homeland of Chechnya. Musaeva didn’t think twice to accept the deal.
Returning to Chechnya, nevertheless, provided its own obstacles. Arriving in one town in an unknown car with St. Petersburg license plates, she immediately excited suspicions; in another, the villagers were more inviting — however none had actually ever appeared on electronic camera prior to.
“I was desperate,” Musaeva confesses. But having actually as soon as resided in a surrounding town, she discovered commonalities with the residents and quickly befriended Bataeva, who presented Musaeva to her family and friends. All would quickly play parts in the movie, efficiently playing variations of themselves on screen.
An unstable year considering that Russia’s major intrusion of Ukraine has actually stirred uncomfortable memories for Musaeva, who experienced flashbacks of her own war-torn youth as she viewed news video footage of Russian warplanes. “That sound, you live with it forever,” she says. “I think many Chechen people, they live this trauma again.”
Though Chechnya is still nominally a Russian republic, Musaeva firmly insists: “I’ve never felt Russian. I’ve always felt Chechen.” Yet she is, by her own admission, captured in the cross-currents of her complex past. “In Germany, I’m an immigrant. And coming back to Chechnya, I’m also different. I’m not like regular Chechen people.”
She is, nonetheless, increasingly pleased with her Chechnyan identity and her historical accomplishment in Berlin. No lesser, she includes, is the motivation she wishes to provide other Chechen ladies and women who, like her, wish to pursue their own fates. “Maybe it will give them some hope, and it will show that there are other possibilities — there are ways to do something they always dreamed of,” she says.
