A FATHER'S WILL

Sky meets earth meets snow. The Cinemascope format is the perfect medium for capturing the full grandeur of the Kyrgyz mountain region and the editing grants the eyes all the time in the world to wander leisurely through the landscape. Alas, what is one to do with all this austere beauty? Young Azat, who has returned to his native village after 15 years in the USA, searches for answers in silence and confronts the village’s inhabitants with his stoic clarity. The debts that his father once amassed must be honoured, and the ashen powder of his mortal remains must be returned to his native soil. Besides being met with anger and rejection, the young man also experiences consolation and solidarity, above all from the family of his former schoolmate Zhoki. The film is infused with a cinematographic sense of basic trust, an imperturbable serenity that enables one to perceive subtle moods. A gift, as the emotions that the family’s disappearance caused to be bottled up and fester in the tiny community, in the uncle who was left behind and in Azat himself, have to ripen in order to be expressed and finally reconciled in the traditional burial ritual. This debut film by Bakyt Mukul and Dastan Zhapar Uulu embodies this sensibility and in doing so manages – with a keen awareness of narrative convention and rupture – to add a deep, authentic nuance to the human cycle of guilt, responsibility and forgiveness.