International Competition

Human beings who have experienced such a strong shock that they are no longer even afraid of death, as it often happens to genocide survivors, sometimes fall into what is known as a feeling or a ‘melancholy’ of timelessness. They live somewhat ‘outside’ time, a mode of extra-temporal existence, waiting for the day when they will free themselves from their suffering. It is these sort of people – the almost ghosts, who have survived the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenians and Azerbaijani that has lasted for almost 20 years – that the filmmaker shows and listens to in his film. Behind them, behind their wandering bodies, behind their frenzies, is what remains of the collapse of the Soviet Union in Caucasus: ruins, uninhabited spaces, tombs, vestiges of war, trenches where soldiers watch for an invisible enemy.