Home­ward

It’s easy to attend one of the big movie fes­ti­vals (in non-pan­dem­ic times) and ignore the small­er side­bars in favour of gorg­ing on the big com­pe­ti­tion titles, or any sneaky Hol­ly­wood pre­mieres that hap­pen to have made the slate. Yet these less-pub­li­cised show­cas­es are often a cru­cible in which hot new tal­ent is forged and, some­times, old mas­ters can be seen flex­ing their cre­ative mus­cles in new and excit­ing ways.

Home­ward is the fea­ture debut of the young Ukrain­ian direc­tor Nari­man Aliev, and the Un Cer­tain Regard side­bar in Cannes was his first big stage of (we hope) many. His film is a creep­ing death fugue and road movie rolled into one, but is also inter­est­ed in father-son emo­tion­al dynam­ics and the com­bustible polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion in the Crimea region.

The bul­let-rid­dled corpse of Naz­im lies on a slab wrapped in muslin and rope. Patch­es of brown blood have soaked into the fab­ric. His father, the hard-nosed man’s man Mustafa (Akhtem Seitablaev), and broth­er, the sen­si­tive and naïve Alim (Remzi Bilyalov), are on the scene to pick him up and trans­port him hope across a polit­i­cal­ly treach­er­ous expanse. Yet pol­i­tics ends up being the least of their trou­bles, as the jour­ney is beset by annoy­ing obsta­cles, but also moments of super­charged bonding.

With­out ever lend­ing phys­i­cal pres­ence to the war, Aliev makes sure that the con­flict is in a con­stant state of low sim­mer on this pre­car­i­ous bor­der­zone. In one episode, when some youths steal Alim’s bag and Musafa’s wal­let dur­ing a repair stopover, the father man­ages to har­ness the son’s rage by quick­ly teach­ing him close-quar­ters knife com­bat to bet­ter defend him­self against such attacks. Fam­i­ly is now built on a bedrock of vio­lence, and the poten­tial for war rages on.

As fair­ly devout Crimean Tatars (an adjunct of Islam), the father-son duo feel a spir­i­tu­al respon­si­bil­i­ty towards their fall­en kin, and the rea­son for under­tak­ing this jour­ney is revealed as an extend­ed bur­ial rite. Yet Mustafa’s almost des­per­ate need for clo­sure is revealed lat­er on as a symp­tom of oth­er issues in his life, issues that sup­ply the film with an extreme­ly poignant final act.

Aliev shows skill beyond his years in his for­mu­la­tion and devel­op­ment of these char­ac­ters, and even though the film draws inspi­ra­tion from all direc­tions, it nev­er feels like a dra­ma that’s stand­ing in for a com­plex polit­i­cal or reli­gious alle­go­ry. The direc­tor maybe lacks for many orig­i­nal moves of his own, as the look and feel of the film sits a lit­tle too com­fort­ably in that bleak­ly-beau­ti­ful east­ern Euro­pean art film mode, but he’s made a might­i­ly impres­sive first film, and that abil­i­ty to flex cre­ative mus­cles will come lat­er on.

Home­ward is released 23 April via New Wave Films.