Actualités

A father and son confront personal and historic agonies on the road to bury their loved one in the land from where their people were displaced

In Homeward, personal and collective pains weave together to make a quietly searing work. Nariman Aliev’s directorial debut depicts the rootlessness of the Crimean Tatars, as well as his own personal history of displacement. Though having a cross-country odyssey at the centre of its narrative, the film acutely understands what many road trip movies have missed: for marginalised people, the open road rarely equates to freedom. In fact, the Tatars in Homeward are constantly subjected to aggressions from others as well as state surveillance.

The journey begins at a place of death: the morgue. Mustafa (Akhtem Seitablaev) is here to pick up the body of his son Nazim (Anatoliy Marempolskiy) who has died in the Russo-Ukrainian war. His other son Alim (Remzi Bilyalov), a college student,...