HEARTH AND HOME SET ALIGHT

The world premiere of the full-length feature film "Nabat" has taken place at the Sala Darsena cinema within the framework of the Venice International Film Festival. The world premiere took place as part of the "Horizons" section, one of the main programmes at the film festival. Eighteen films were selected for the competition from different countries - Italy, France, Great Britain, Germany, the USA, Iran and others; their authors were world renowned masters of the cinema who had revealed their characteristic director's skills in their films.

The director of the film Elcin Musaoglu [Elchin Musaoglu], the actress playing the main role, Fatemeh Motamed Arya and the picture's producer Misviq Xatamov took part in the festival.The was made at the "Azerbaijan Film" studio, commissioned by Azerbaijan's Ministry of Culture. The authors of the screenplay were Elcin Musaoglu and Elxan Nabiyev, the director of photography was Abdulrahim Besharat. The parts were played by Vidadi Aliyev, Ramin Zeynalov, Sabir Mammadov, Rovsan Agayev.

The world has never known such loneliness

What is "Nabat" about? It is about an Azerbaijani woman called Nabat, a simple peasant woman who suffered greater grief than ever happens in the wide world. Her son went away forever to fight in the war. She is the mother of a martyr… The only photograph she had of him was lost in a bad year. It was taken and was not returned. She should have removed that portrait from the wall, so that later… You see, he didn't have another one. From the very first minutes of the film the viewer finds himself a prisoner of human values. To be more exact - inhuman values.

Two containers of milk to sell per day, that's all of her business. And then - that's at the start. As time goes on there is nobody to sell it to. A simple "meal", a bowl of boiling milk with bits of dried bread in it. She feeds it to her husband, who is completely ill and is lying down. Obediently, so as not to offend her, he consents to eat it although a lump of bread gets stuck in his throat. The old man, her husband gets a bath in the wash-tub. He knew, probably he knew that now she would go away by the morning so he had asked her to. And he was right. She did not heed the calls to leave the village, she did not have the strength to do it. She remained all alone under the sky. National loneliness is more terrifying than all the others," he recalls the aphorism of Vaqif Samadoglu. It gets right to the point, just as in the water. Water… Lots of water - it is pouring down, dripping, gurgling, foaming, rustling…

The next thing she is digging her husband's grave amidst the roar of the torrential rain. In a single hour her once happy life has been destroyed, as if she had been struck by evil for some reason.

Water, like truth itself, its great cleanliness, which can wash away the impurity of 

Thoughts and premises. The veracity is in its penetratingly ringing candour. Like rare drops from a wash-stand that you have touched. They are bitter because are no longer needed, like the howl of the wolf on an indifferent night with a full moon. The morning is grey and drowsy like the whole of her present life…

She is the only person in the whole village, she and her cow. And now without… She is done for. No matter how she searched, how she called out…The howling of the wolf reached her on that night, sometimes sounding very near. It turns out that you can convey emptiness in a frame. The foggy emptiness. How they look with their eyes that have been crying, looking round in a lost manner… That dead tree looks terrifying. The emptiness … It attacks you from every nook and cranny like evil pressing in on you. Emptiness is another character. The door which is hanging loosely on a single hook, squeaks and creaks as if it wants to say something.

Then she makes the decision to let the fires go out, to light all the kerosene lamps in the houses, even if they are empty. Nabat lights one lamp, then another, then a third…Our fires should not go out. That is not right. She goes from house to house. They are all so different, each with its own structure. There is the cottage of the village intellectual with a globe in the window. She looks at it, appealing. Appealing to the world which has still not heard her. Still not… It is almost hopeless.

A now, whose workshop is that, yes the local photographer. A huge heap of burnt photographs, big ones, somewhat blurred and eroded, crumpled round the edges, and some even quite, quite good.  Echoes of someone's life - moments of joy and… She searches in the heap, trying to find the one and only photograph of her son whom she has lost, but no, the photograph has disappeared in this spiritual harshness, just like that, but how can you keep track of those constant explosions of war.

She went on lighting the lamps. A person cannot live alone and should not. There they are burning in the night, in the little houses under the black skies… It is cosy the way they spread their golden glow, warmed up as if no-one had ever left at all. The woman looks out of her own window at the lights lighting up the roofs here and there, just as they used to, when you came back in the happy days without war. 

She let numerous hearths burn out

The subject of a strong-willed person capable of combatting the situation is most interesting for me," the director Elcin Musaoglu recounts. The opportunity to have an influence, a beneficial influence on circumstances, not a simple course for them - what could be more significant in life! To remain alone in an entire village, she warmed it with breath for 40 long days…" Warmed it in the literal sense of the word.

And the enemy, seeing the light in the window, in the numerous windows, thought that the village was inhabited!

The film "Nabat" is a kind of documentary. And there is nothing simple about that. Musaoglu is a documentary director. This is the creative work of Elcin, back in the times of Oberhausen, when his 40-metre film "Glass Toys" had quite a lot of success. The film was about deaf and dumb children, those living in a boarding school. The deafness, the wail that goes unheard, the wall rising to the sky, try to breach it - comes from there.

It has to be said that the subject of Nagornyy Karabakh is not a new one for him; at any event he has approached the subject a few times, albeit not directly. We have before us the little film "The Dreams of Reed City" dedicated the child refugees from Nagornyy Karabakh; and once again we are confronted by their pitch-dark, foggy days with their powerlessness - in the alternatives of war and peace, enrichment and impoverishment and love and hatred…

His first works were highly promising from the point of view of the potential "ending", with some kind of concealed internal spring within the psychologism itself, a full-length film that left its mark in the "big" cinema. We are talking about his first feature film "40th Door", which he made five years ago, the winning of which brought him 40 invitations to festivals (USA, Germany, [South] Korea, Spain, Russia, France, Italy and others), which were crowned with awards in various nominations.

Reanimating a lost soul

"Nabat" is the second serious declaration of this type. Here nothing takes place that we are accustomed to see in today's cinema. The plot, if there is any, is somehow "slowed down". The audio is cut to a minimum. The same is true of the action - she simply goes to the mountain and back… From house to house - there he is, right at the top of the highest mountain. She walks backwards and forwards and that's all. You can see the whole of life under foot along her little path. You revel in its length, savouring every detail worthy of mention, which grabs you, striking you. Symbols, nothing but symbols, but how eloquent they are in their failure to agree.

A feature film without the bedroom scenes financed by swindlers and without direct reanimation. It turns out that it is not that that keeps people watching. The reanimation is of completely different kind.

The reanimation of a lost soul. Two hours fly by in a moment. It is as if you are hovering with breaks above the highest point, from which the world looks quite different. This is how the war, the lone hero and the quietness should be filmed.The thunder of shells falling in the silence. My God, what kind of silence was that that existed before everyday life, reigning before we came into the world. There is no way that we can know about that, driven into urbanisation as we are. It is the silence in which you can hear how the snow is falling, the rustling… Before the mystical mood, it grows out of life itself, from its observations, following a chain of strange, sometimes inexplicable moments, the riddle of which there is no point in guessing, In short mysticism accompanied the whole filming process.

So, according to the tales of the director, the winter unexpectedly had second thoughts about starting and the snow which was "essential" for these parts (7 km higher up than Lahic [a mountain village in Azerbaijan]) hardly managed to start falling before the end of September, and they could not wait until December itself. But there was yet another character, the fog, which had an active part to play, like a future female character. E. Musaoglu, who had grown out of documentary cinema and felt sure of himself here, was good at  providing details, which properly speaking make a film a film. The empty containers, the dried up udder of the cow, the bucket overturned by the merciless wind, the uneaten hard-boiled egg. There it is standing on the table with a bite taken out of it in a home where people no longer lived…The distressing silence during the time before the snow was heralded as coming. And even the drops hanging from the clothes pegs on the wet line are like the tears caused by abandonment.

A kerosene lamp is yet another character in the film, albeit not the most important. Like kindness - when she heard the wolf howling the woman did not shoot it because she saw that it had new-borncubs nearby. Later, she made it possible for the she-wolf to leave the ravine by stretching out a board to her. It was the same she-wolf that had bitten her cow to death, the last thing that she had left. 

Many things were rethought during the viewing. For example, that more than one film like that could have been made rather than talking about it for 10 years. The film was like a way of getting through to people, because the framesare crying out to them. They touch the bare unprotected part of the nerve. What talks could there be; the truth was there , as if in the palm of the hand. What was there to sort out, to prove: the lands of others should not be conquered, vanquishing the population who have nowhere to go, people should not be killed, while having the shaky mud of their land trampled on two or three times and God knows standards are being observed. Mothers should not be forced to suffer by making them wait until the bitter end, to the last snow of their life.  

The Actress

They would have to find an actress who would be able to bring the author's idea's to life. He found her in Tehran. Fatemeh Motamed Arya was well known for her appearances in the theatre and the cinema, not only in her homeland. It is sufficient to say that she, as a good-will ambassador, had been on the jury at the annual Cannes Film Festival, and also acts in the Brecht Theatre. As far as the film "Nabat" is concerned, her mindset had to be absolutely right for the character, and it should be said that she really did do a good job. It is impossible to say that she could have done any better.

Besides purely professional acting skills, the actress needed to be really fit. Throughout the film she walked backwards and forwards all the time. But it was not difficult for her. Fatemeh xanim loved to walk, shunning the public transport whenever possible. She fed all the cats and dogs in Ismayilli district, and would walk beyond it during the breaks from filming. It is interesting that she learnt Azeri specially for the film. The last scene was easy for her. The actress needed to stop breathing for 3 minutes and 20 seconds, during a single shoot. She demanded 19 roubles from the director, which is neither a lot nor little. "You're a fascist," she joked, addressing Musaoglu. They also needed to find a she-wolf, another character; he went to Kazakhstan to do that. Yet another important component was the photography which was splendid! To mention just one frame: she is bent over, dragging a cart - the tired silhouette carrying an excessive burden filmed against the fiery ocean of the sunset - this is worth a lot!

As if drawn with a pencil, the graphics are as high as the sky. The sunset filling the world  with sadness. How many of these penetrating finds there are throughout the film. The penetrating nature of the camera producing striking images. How can we talk about genre when everything is bathed in uncertainty. The film parable that was, but not in the past, in present time. Realism - documentary and natural.

The film is inspired by the times, it is tactile…

Today when the key to dialogue among peoples appears to be lost, you can convince yourself that, after watching the daily news bulletin, the film by the Azerbaijani film makers is not just a subject, but a very strong subject. All that was needed for this was to simply rise above the situations absurd in its blatant senselessness, and look at the foreshortened everyday life, that makes the pain of  one person the pain of us all. Depending on the colour of the skin and the religion, no matter whether you are an Arab, a Ukrainian or an Azeri. So that no-one's son has to be killed by a foreign bullet…

Once again she has a dream, the same dream. She sees her son, her little boy. He is watering his horse by the river and smiles at her… She cast a side look at the door through which he, a handsome man, departed. And his back as he went away into the dark aperture forms the same frame.

A person's life lasts from the cradle till the day he perishes… This is what the cradle is like. In one of the houses it is empty now, rocked on rusty nails by the wind blowing into the empty frame. And death is round every corner, along that same path. It is Nabat's path. She goes from house to house, lights matches from the box with her nimble, albeit numb, fingers. She strikes the matches, that do not want to light because of the damp…

Each of us ourselves finds in her a support, a support for a tormented soul. She has found it.

This woman on her own has stood up to the war. But what is surprising about that - who other than a woman should guard the hearth, guard it gently, without pathetically gender care. The director is firmly convinced that the tragedy needs to be recreated grain by grain. Then the grains will come together to form a monumental canvas. A canvas of blasphemous injustice. It was very important to record and show this to everyone who had never heard about this drama or knows about it from hearsay, that is in the falsified, distorted interpretation of our neighbours, ethnic and non-ethic… Although the film is not about them, or rather not only about them. It is a question of global evil, and as time has shown, tortuously drawn out evil. The director did manage to achieve this.

Nothing is secondary to him. Starting from the name of the film's main character, Nabat [meaning "An alarm bell"], which has an optimally semantic coincidence in global and world senses, you never cease to be surprised at these magical "new formations" at the meeting point of two languages. The association that arises right from the start of the film - "The Alarm Bell at Buchenwald" by Muslim Magomayev, with his incantations "Protect the World!". "People of the world, stand up for a moment!" could be heard from time to time from the silence beyond the cadre. Yet another merit of the film is that throughout the two hours there is not a single mention of Nagornyy Karabakh, it does not need to be addressed, it is above it. Evil does not recognise regional frameworks. Naturally there is a greeting to the fire, not to the artillery fire, but to the fire of peace, that very lamp. Atasgah [Ateshgah; a fire temple of fire-worshippers]…Ataskas [ceasefire in Azeri]… Day-night-day… that is our life, in the row of illogical manifestations. Day comes follows night because the Sun always moves from Death to Birth.

…This is because Black is followed by Light… On that 40th fateful night everything was completely different…The figure of a woman on her own, frozen in the thin crust of ice over the snow, all covered in the powdery snow on the bench outside her house, she did not go away anywhere… a frozen monument covered in hoar frost with its expectations, the frozen palm of her hand open to beg, into which the snow had fallen… The conflict, which is frozen to this day… The audience which had been released from the film did not applaud straightaway. Well, the applause did not seem to be really appropriate in the context of the moment. A minute of silence would have been more in tune with the subject… And it turns out that that sometimes happens… the premiere was like a requiem,,, the film like a wail…quiet and loud - incomprehensibly synchronized. A gulp of truth in the murky stream of the serial-like "dramatism". Vilely sad…