Hostage

Colour, 35 mm
Azerbaijan, 2005, 95 min
IP – International premiere
Section: East of the West - Films in Competition

Synopsis

During the late 1980s and early 1990s the Armenian minority in Karabakh attempted to break away from Azerbaijan, one of the former Soviet republics. Overnight these former neighbours became enemies, and simple village folk were suddenly made hostages in a complex power game. One of the Azerbaijani villages right on the border is home to the family of the peasant farmer Kerim, who has just been captured by the Armenians. The village council decides to take an Armenian in order to arrange a hostage exchange. They imprison the wounded man in the barn next to Kerim’s house, where his wife and three children desperately await the husband’s return. The captive from the other side of the border finds himself in exactly the same situation – he, too, has three children, he finds it hard to scrape a living together, he has never done anything to harm anyone and, like Kerim, he just wants to go back home. But life in Karabakh is far more complex now. Blood calls for blood…

About the director

Eldar Guliyev (b. 1941, Baku, Azerbaijan) studied film at Moscow University until 1967 and worked as a director for the Azerbaijanfilm studio in Baku. He has made over fifteen films and documentaries, including coproductions with Mosfilm and Barrandov (Favorable Wind, 1974). Select filmography: The Bay of Joy (Bukhta radosti, 1977), Bábek (1979), Nizámí (1982), The Legend of the Silver Lake (Legenda serebryannogo ozera, 1984), Seaside Trip (Zagorodnaya progulka, 1986), The Sabotage (1989) and How Beautiful Is the World (1998).