Another Sky

Colour, 35 mm
Russia, 2010, 86 min
IP – International premiere
Section: Official Selection - Competition

Synopsis

The arid Central Asian steppe. Ali and his son collect dead sheep. The boy misses his mother who has been out of touch since leaving for a better life in Moscow. They decide to find her. The big city offers them the fate of the gastarbeiter: occasional income and a hand-to-mouth existence. Ali speaks to the police, contacts the Uzbek community, and tirelessly makes the rounds from kiosk to hospital to market. And he patiently bares all insults.... The film unfolds journalistically, documenting without bias the lifestyle and livelihood of a man on the edge, in foreign surroundings that essentially force him to communicate intuitively. Just as he fails to notice dramatic world events reported on the television news, the outside world doesn’t notice his internal drama. He’s merely goods on the work market, likened to trees cut down by an ingenious machine that removes the branches and bark, and then cuts up the bare trunks into preset lengths. And the chips fly....

About the director

Dmitri Mamulia (b. 1969, Tbilisi) graduated in 1993 from the humanities department of Tbilisi State University where he later lectured. He was editor-in-chief of Logos, a literary philosophical almanac published in Russia and Japan; a study entitled Three Times Hesse (Dreimal Hesse) came out in Germany. In 1999 he won first prize for his screenplay What Anne and Vera Have from Tbilisi’s Adam and Eva studios. He has published the collections Anal Roses (Analniye rozy), Internal Birds (Ptitsy vnutri), and a study on Muscovite romantic conceptualism. After 2005 he studied at the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors. He shot the short films The Indescribable Association (Neopisuyemoye soobshchestvo, 2006) and Silence of Sirens (Molchaniye siren, 2006). Moscow (2007), a pseudo-documentary made with Bakur Bakuradze, focuses on a Kirghiz family trying to make its way in the capital. Another Sky is his feature debut.