In Between Dying

Davud lives with his ailing mother, comes out annoyed at living together and begins a quest: love, meaning, life.

He kills a man who has insulted his friend, and a doctor watching idly asks three boys to chase and catch him. They will arrive after he meets a rabies-ridden girl who kills her abusive father by biting him on the neck; after he meets a woman beaten by her alcoholic husband; after he gives a ride to a bride fleeing an arranged marriage.

A spiritual honeymoon among the mists of the Arzebaijani forests will be completed with the bride's suicide paid for by having finally known the unexpected meaning of love.

Each time there is a murder-suicide, the washing of a living woman's body before burial, and an encounter with those who wait but do not recognize love. The return home. Mother's death.

After the family trilogy, Baydarov escapes and returns to his mother's home by traveling through stations of death and rebirth.

The search for meaning, love, grief, pity, the space that is not there and the silent, lonely time of fog.

The ontology of the inexhaustible question, philosophical introspection on lack, waiting, chance, yet imbued with metaphysical sacredness.

Life as a quest: absence desolation, resignation, passion managed in an authorial, marked, structured, absolutely recognizable artistic language, with traits of contemporary art installation, on asphyxiating, dusty and desolating landscapes, albeit extremely poetic and visionary.

A rare lesson in that art has only one purpose: not to reproduce the visible but to make it visible.