Yakha is 17 and loves roaming about the fields with her friend Madina. Her home is a village in Chechnya where she lives with her mother and little brother. She is self-composed by nature and knows what she wants, but is also open to life – which begins to take shape in the form of certain cultural and social concepts. Madina wants to get married; Yakha’s older sister wants a divorce. Her mother is against it – after all, she herself managed to persevere. Together they visit the grave of their father who died in the second Chechen war.
This debut film by Malika Musaeva impresses with its stylistically and narratively unobtrusive cinematic impressionism that succeeds in balancing the main character’s carefree youthfulness and inner maturity. Yakha’s complex emotional world is conveyed primarily in terms of atmosphere, via looks and gestures, landscapes and movements in the air. The deep rift between tradition and modernity, and between gendered reality and self-determination, is all the more forcefully revealed. A film about what it means to be and live as a young woman. And about melancholy.
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