Chinar Film Azerbaijan

A poetical quotation puts a damper on high expectations of earthly life. Because human beings were not sent to earth but cast out to it. Disappointments are to be expected. In “I Still Talk to You,” Turkan Huseyn illustrates a conversation with her friend. It is about love and the longing to return to the past, about childhood and its no longer existing coordinates in time and space. A melancholy dialogue broken up by brief encounters: stranded looking people who also explain their views of and experiences with love. Meanwhile, the fish in the Caspian Sea are coated in a thin layer of oil that merely needs to be wiped off. It used to be less dirty here, Turkan Huseyn says. When you are a child, everything seems less dirty, her friend replies. A laconic zooming back and forth between inside and outside, in the centre of which a few buckets of blood-red flowers bloom anyway.

After years of being released from prison, Huseyn calls his wife Gulshad to meet him. Gulshad is hopeful that she will be reunited with the person she loves after many years. Moreover, she is waiting for a logical explanation for some unanswered questions. She wants to find out why Huseyn has not been meeting her, and whether he committed the crime. Huseyn also has his own plan for their meeting. They enter a cave with only one entrance, far from everyone and everything, to confront their past.

At the end of the working day, a policeman, medical expert, and investigator arrive at the place of the suicide. The routine investigation and testimony of the fiancee do not lead to anything suspicious. But one mistake and an ordinary working day turn into a fight against moral and ethical principles and the question of where the lines of our compassion end.

The Papanin district in Baku, Azerbaijan, was to be demolished several years ago. While its inhabitants keep waiting in vain for the demolition and for the relevant compensation, the life in the district moves in its own, slow pace. The black-and-white meditative film recounts, against the backdrop of the empty streets, personal microstories about the loss of illusions, the joys of everyday life, encounters of love and death. Together, the fragments of the locals’ lives form a mosaic image of a place soon to be wiped from the face of the Earth.