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, sits silently on a nearby bench. It remains unclear at first that the two are related; their body language is awkward as an uneasy, tense distance lingers between them. After retrieving the body, Mustafa and Alim face numerous obstacles, both from themselves and from outsiders, as they attempt to return to Russian-annexed Crimea for the burial.