THE YURT

The seasons come, the seasons go, and Ubay lives in his yurt, tends his sheep, shears them when the wool’s thick enough. One day is much like the other, and the grim-faced man spares no effort to keep the outside world at bay. However, not even Ubay’s farmstead at the end of a road through a lonely Uzbekhi valley is beyond the reach of progress. The world arrives in the form of a television set, carried into his house by his son Dyavahir. The doting father who hides his affection behind a harsh patriarchal facade watches on helplessly as the young man is swept away by the images of the wide world. When Dyavahir’s first love moves to the city to study then marries another man, the son is overcome with anguished rage. He vows to break free from his domineering father, and joins the army, leaving Ubay a broken man. The father slowly realizes that if he wants to have a future at all, he will have to face up to the past he has long pushed away. And so, while Dyavahir is learning that travel is not necessarily the key to freedom, a tender shoot of liberty is growing in the yurt that is his home. And that is where the prodigal son finds freedom in the end, just when he had begun to give up hope. Ayub Shahobiddinov tells a simple tale, a parable dealing with nothing less than the great questions of human existence. Thanks to the Uzbheki director’s keen eye and fine sense of detail, the long, slow sequences of his tranquil yet intensive film convey a sense of the progressive development made by father and son amidst a landscape of almost preternatural beauty.