TIME, MAN, ARTIST

Murad Ibrahimbeyov is a graduate of VGIK (The Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography), director, screenwriter, actor, and writer. His creative portfolio includes motion pictures, documentaries, several roles in films, novels and short stories. He has been awarded at various international film festivals, including the Nika Prize (2003) for the best non-fiction film (Neft) and the award of the Union of Filmmakers of Azerbaijan for the trilogy İnsan (2019). Last summer the talented artist received his award and presented two new documentaries named İnsan and Dağıstanım. Etiraf at the Cinema House in Baku.

Trilogy Neft

The beginning of the last century. Train. Women in veils, men. An almost exhausted horse is waddling around a mechanism breaking through the earth to extract black streams of viscous fluid. Oil! This is the opening scene of a trilogy with no accompanying text but convincingly detailed, expressive and emotional sequence of events, which allow tracing the director’s line of thought down to the smallest details. A Russian Soviet writer Boris Pilnyak described the oil production in Absheron as follows: “They pump oil from the earth. The fire that has burned for ages in the temple of fire worshipers is now converted to gasoline at the nearest plant. This land of antiquities on the Absheron Peninsula of the Caspian Sea now hosts hundreds of thousands of people, including Russian, Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, Iranian, Turk, German workers and engineers...” This is how thee writer praises the men who have managed to enter deep into the earth and subdue its mineral wealth to their will. Director Murad Ibrahimbeyov analyses the relationship between oil and humankind at the beginning of the 21st century in the reverse order, when the power of oil slowly but steadily turn the men into slaves. Obsession with 'black gold' becomes not so much a driving force of progress but an end in itself. The humankind greedily devours the minerals pumping out increasing volumes of oil every single day! This black and viscous liquid has more power over people today than ever! To explain his thoughts, the director of the film shows the chronicle of invasion of 'shi yo' (the mountain oil meaning oil in Chinese and which has been extracted in China since 347 AD) in our life and consciousness. Ibrahimbeyov analyses the mechanism if this invasion in the second part of his trilogy titled…

"Civilization"

People have known oil since ancient times in Babylon, Egypt, and Byzantium. They used it during the construction of roads, buildings, sealing of ships, for lighting and heating of premises, etc. People of the 20th century have taken the scale of oil production much further turning it into a powerful engine for the development of technologies in all spheres of our life. Quote from Pilnyak'sGorod vetrov: “For today the human civilization uses the derivatives of oil such as gasoline, fuel oil, tar, naphtha, engine oil, soap oil, paraffin, asphalt to launch planes to the sky and to move ships across the oceans.” Obviously, by the time of writing his novel, Pilnyak did not know that besides the things he listed, we could also invent and use oil in the production and exploitation of tanks, submarines, missiles and God knows what else! May be if we have used oil for peaceful purposes, we would praise it as a substance that ennobled the Man and the world around him. But no! We failed the test. Oil defeated our imperfect spirit in an unequal battle, making Homo sapiens its slave. By controlling his consciousness, oil turned into a tool of self-destruction. Now we can move to the third part of the documentary…

"Human-being"

Human mind is unique in terms of self-destruction. Weapons were not enough to fight for possession of the minerals. Oil has spurred Homo sapiens to new actions to exterminate its own kind: concentration camps, nuclear bombs, napalm, etc. It seemed to whisper: “Go and kill!”, “Go and invade!”, “Everything belongs to you!” That's when you tend to believe conspiracists who claim that oil is a live energy substance that ingeniously controls humankind with diabolical power. Children and the elderly, men and women are sacrificed for obsession, and humans invent a new word which implies physical extermination of people on racial, national and religious grounds. This word is genocide! Then more specific definitions appear, such as the Holocaust, ethnocide, pogrom, Moriori, war crime, massacres of indigenous populations of Americas, extermination of the Kurdish population of Northern Iraq, residents of Khojaly and Nagorno-Karabakh, massacre in Rwanda, killing of Bosnian Muslims and so on. Do you think this will stop the humans? But no! We continue to invent and build on what can devastate the planet! Obsession for self-destruction is not a reminiscence of the past. It is tenacious, like oil. It would be possible to put an equal sign, if not for the final of the film. New living organism is born deep in the ocean, as in mother's womb! A kid confidently and beautifully moves to the camera with his eyes wide open. He looks at us, as if asking: “What's next?” Maybe right now, when humanity “successfully” degrades, it is time to stop. Otherwise, we will have no other choice but to restart everything from scratch. From Adam and Eve. And maybe the hero of Kurban Said's famous novel, who dreamed of filling all oil wells with soil and sowing wheat on it was right, so that whoever eagers for oil and unleashes wars lose this desire forever...

“Dağıstanım. Etiraf"

According to Murad Ibrahimbeyov, the proposal to make a film about the famous Soviet poet and writer from Daghestan Rasul Gamzatov came in handy. Like any other artist, he was in crisis. This project has brought a lot of new and interesting things to his creative and professional life. He has learned many new things about the Caucasus and discovered features he had not even suspected before.

The script written by Rustam Ibrahimbeyov in collaboration with the former president of Daghestan Ramazan Abdulatipov is based on the book My Daghestan by Rasul Gamzatov, who was born in the mountain village of Tsad in the Khunzakh District. The film is dedicated to the 90th birthday of the poet.

The film was shot at several locations, including the poet’s native village, Makhachkala and Derbent. The cast includes famous actors Haji Ibrahimov, Huseyn Gaziyev, Khadijat Jamaludinova, Vakhtang Kikabidze and so on. Voice-over artist is the People's Artist of the USSR Vasily Lanovoy. It is not only the voice of the main character that impresses but also his performance. It seems that it is Rasul himself holding an intimate conversation with the audience, telling not only about himself, but about what it means to be a highlander. It seems that one begins to understand the poetry of Rasul Gamzatov only after watching the film.

Highlander’s Code of Honour

Both the screenwriter and director unobtrusively make us follow the thoughts and feelings of Rasul. It seems as if he is talking to us about his beliefs, his thoughts and feelings about homeland, parents, friends, women who awaken Love, his wife Patimat, and so on. You suddenly realise that the highlander’s code of honour, which is passed from father to son, is not just a set of beautiful words, but a life style. Nothing is accidental in the life of a highlander: neither a bird flying in the sky, nor an inscription on the cradle of a new-born child, a thought born in his soul.

How does a boy grow and turn into a man? How does a man aware of the degree and measure of his responsibility for home, family, friends and homeland age? These are thoughts and feelings of Rasul Gamzatov, a prominent poet and writer of the 20th century, which he uses to reveal the soul of fellow highlanders, the nature of their mental characteristics.

The world of the poet and the world of an ordinary man merge turning the audience into friends. These are the main topics discussed in a documentary film-study Dağıstanım. Etiraf. This is a real success for the director and screenwriter, who opened Daghestan to millions of viewers who still consider the North Caucasus as an unknown, hence frightening world. Myths about bearded highlanders bearing guns have been alive since the time of Lermontov. İbrahimbeyov and his team dispelled this myth in their film through Gamzatov’s works.

By the way, this is not the only film about Rasul Gamzatov. But the film of Ibrahimbeyov is the only one that goes beyond the scope of a simple biographical narrative; it is an expressive artistic presentation of relations between Time, Man and Artist.