Eden 2006 in Azerbaijan - Part 1

by Ludmila Cvikova

September 2006, 2 a.m.
International airport in Baku, Azerbaijan

Even though I’ve been underway nine hours already, there are still many kilometres ahead of me. I'm on the road in an old, rusty BMW, and the driver seems to know no security limits to his driving (180 km/hour on the dusty, non-asphalt roads), as the Dutch filmmaker Sander Blom (IFFR 2006) had already warned me via mobile. During the next six hours’ drive, I hear a lot about the production of the latest film by Veit Helmer, who obviously made an impression on the local film industry people because of his energetic and demanding way of working.

I’m on my way to EDEN 2006, a workshop for young filmmakers from Azerbaijan, Iran, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan taking place in the small Caucasian village of Kish. Sander Blom is a mentor here, giving lessons in filmmaking and helping the participants to make a short film together. He has come a week earlier and they all are very busy when we arrive early in the morning. My task is to present IFF Rotterdam, its programmes, films and goals. Kish is a picturesque village at the foot of the Caucasian mountains with wonderful friendly people and where the time seems to have stopped fifty years ago. Soon enough I find out that my Russian is of no use here – but our students mostly do speak it and so we can use Russian as our working language, besides English.

It will be interesting to have a look at how the region has developed since my last trip to a festival in Baku in 1999 that resulted in the screening of the Yellow Bride by Yaver Rzaev – a pacifistic feature film about the nonsense of the Azeri-Armenian war conflict Nagorno-Karabakh at the IFFR 2000. Two men: the Armenian Gadir and the Azerbaijani Artavaz – find themselves in the chaos of the conflict between their two countries. Brought together by a twist of fate, they flee an incomprehensible war. The film had to be developed in the Film Laboratories in Prague (the only place where they could work with the old Soviet film material) and with the support of the Hubert Bals Fund, otherwise it would not be possible to show it and it would just be forgotten, I suppose. These kinds of films do not expect official support, and the facilities of the film industry in the country are suffering from the bad economic situation as well. The film screening was organized thanks to the active journalist Aynur Mustafaeva who later became a film producer, a member of the Association of the Young Filmmakers of Azerbaijan (founded in February 2006) and one of the organizers of Eden. It seems like things are happening in the country – there is a will and an enthusiasm among people in the film industry. Maybe it will also help to build the cultural bridges between Armenia and Azerbaijan that still seem to be billions of kilometres away from each other? When this subject is brought up a few times during the workshop, it seems to wake up pretty emotional reactions. These are people working in culture – what can it be like outside of it?

All the roads in Azerbaijan are decorated with huge billboards of the former president Aliev and his son, the current president – at least every five kilometres. The pride of the nation has been awakening and as I have often have seen it in the ex-communist countries in transition, the nationalism can sometimes reach unhealthy proportions. When meeting the director Yaver Rzaev in Baku again, after six years of not seeing him, I sadly realized a film like Yellow Bride would be impossible to make these days. The forced internationalism and brotherhood of the nations of the Soviet Union (and all communist countries) is gone forever and new relations are often very fragile. But better times will come for sure, as I know that during the meetings of the IFA-SC (Independent Filmmakers’ Association - South Caucasus) in Georgia, the filmmakers of all three south Caucasian countries (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan) do meet and co-operate together.

(click here for Eden 2006- Part 2)