There was a peaceful feeling at the recent Berlin Film Festival. “The Cage Is Looking for a Bird” directed by Malika Musaeva was revealed — the very first movie in the Chechen language that has actually ever existed at the worldwide movie celebrations. It was likewise the only movie from Russia at this year’s Berlinale.
Musaeva is a graduate of the workshop of the famous Russian filmmaker, Alexander Sokurov. The movie was co-produced by the Sokurov Fund and Ilya Stewart’s Hype Studios, which was formerly in Moscow and dealt with a variety of Kirill Serebrennikov’s jobs, consisting of “Petrov’s Flu” and “Tchaikovsky’s Wife.” The filmmakers will contribute 50% of all profits to Human Rights Watch.
“The Cage is Looking for a Bird” has to do with a 17-year-old high school trainee, Yakha, who resides in North Ossetia and imagine breaking out from under her family’s stringent guardianship. It’s an essay on the position of ladies in Chechen society, where youth and yearning for liberty dispute with custom.
Weeds grow on the when fertile fields where Yakha (played by newbie starlet Khadizha Bataeva) and her buddy, Madina (Madina Akkieva), stroll together. They like to push the ground dreamily taking a look at the sky as if they do not require to mature or to consider what their future holds. The scenes appear so serene initially, however they conceal disconcerting indications noticeable on closer examination. Yakha’s older sis wishes to avoid her bully of a partner however her family, including her own mom, protests it. Women are expected to play the function designated to them by nature and society: to get wed, bring to life kids, and to bear with their other halves. And by regional custom, if there is a divorce the lady need to leave her kids to be raised by her spouse.
But we barely see any guys in this town. Instead, we see a cemetery that advises us of the wars that happened in this area. Yakha’s dad passed away throughout the Second Chechen War and her mom can hardly discover his tomb amongst numerous others.
Copyright © Philip Matousek
Born in 1992 in Grozny, Chechnya, Malika Musayeva now lives and operates in Germany. During the Chechen War in 1999, she and her family left initially to Ingushetia and after that to Ukraine. They went back to Russia in 2003 and resided in Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria, where, 7 years later on, Malika studied under the Sokurov. Her movie was at first scheduled to be evaluated at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022 however she was disinvited after the war started. Sokurov implicated the celebration of discrimination and withdrew his own movie, which later on premiered in Locarno, Switzerland.
Sokurov’s trainees have actually handled to develop something that Russian movie theater has actually long stopped to reveal: movies about today day instead of movies that commemorate previous success. These movies are made in non-Russian native languages and reveal an international Russia.
“The Cage Is Looking for a Bird” is really comparable to “Closeness” by Kantemir Balagov or “Unclenching Fists” by Kira Kovalenko. The main style is the exact same: A woman from the North Caucasus is strangled in the vice of custom.
But the world of Musaeva’s movie is simply womanly, a location where ladies have actually found out to conceal their sensations. Sometimes enjoyment or yearning run over their faces in an almost invisible wave. Their feelings are shown in the landscapes that Musaeva masterfully portrays: uneasy skies, mountains lost in a haze, green hills and serpentine mountain roadways. It is a visual research study in the green tones of the limitless Caucasian hills, so harmoniously integrated with the red hair of the heroine. The red color appears to symbolically highlight her peculiarity. Yakha is prepared to combine with the foliage of the hills where she matured; it appears she wants to liquify into the landscape and be saved from the laws recommended by individuals.
The style specified in the title of the photo is revealed in little information, such as Yakha’s collections of bird plumes or the off-screen singing of birds. Yakha’s preferred liberty is born not from the resolution of dispute, however from the hurting sensation of requirement. However, physical efforts to leave won’t bring the preferred freedom, simply as the really principle of liberty is not restricted to the physical state.
This movie was made when an awful brand-new war is happening in Eastern Europe. The subject of the history of Russia and its relations with its nearby states, which excited little interest in the past, is now bring in the attention of the worldwide neighborhood. Debutante Musaeva checks out deep space of Chechen culture, closed and unknown outside the republic. Had the movie been launched a couple of years earlier, maybe it would have imperceptibly vanished into a kaleidoscope of other works by the trainees of Sokurov, today, due to the lack of Russia in the list of producing nations, “The Cage is Looking for a Bird” was seen and warmly gotten by audiences and critics.
The style of the 2 Chechen wars has actually hardly ever been illustrated in the movie theater, with the exception of Sergei Bodrov’s “Prisoner of the Mountains” and Alexei Balabanov’s “War.” Musaeva’s movie is filled with sorrow for the victims of the Second Chechen War — described not a war however a “counter-terrorist operation” by the Russian authorities. The director firmly insists that she does not make political movies which her movie is not about the war. But isn’t any movie political in the sense that every movie handles the life of individuals, their liberty and rights?
