A teacher from a Tajik village fights desperately for justice in this poetic realist film by Jamshed Usmonov with music by Satyajit Ray, which won prizes at international European film festivals.
A school teacher is immersed in his work, enjoys telling his students about history and nature, and is writing a book. But his family’s life is overshadowed by his neighbor, a powerful and wealthy man who has built a toilet right by the teacher’s fence and is peeping at his young wife through a hole. Having failed to find justice with the local authority, in retaliation the teacher starts digging a public toilet right by the windows of the village’s administration. The excavated earth gets moved back into the pit at night and the teacher’s family are receiving threats, but nothing can stop a man obsessed with justice. The confrontation ends when the hole dug by the teacher gets so deep that it turns into a spring, and the village gets a new well.
Flight of the Bee was one of the first feature films made in Tajikistan after the end of the civil war (1992–1997). The screenwriter and director Jamshed Usmonov and his fellow student and cinematographer Min Boung-hun made the film using their own savings. The story is based on a family legend about Usmonov’s great-grandfather and is set in the village of Asht in northern Tajikistan, where Usmonov was born and grew up. The characters speak the local dialect: to dub the professional actors who starred in the film alongside real villagers, Usmonov searched for authentic voices walking around Dushanbe and listening to people’s speech and intonation. In his next and better-known film Angel of the Right (2002), shot after emigration, he continued to work with his historical homeland. It is also set in Asht and features local people and the Tajik language. While the subject matter is bleak—social inequality and the loss of home—both films are full of empathy for places and people familiar to the director.
The screening will be followed by a Q& A session with director Jamshed Usmonov.
The film will be screened in Tajik with Russian subtitles.
Flight of the Bee
Director: Jamshed Usmonov
Tajikistan, South Korea, 1998. 85 min.
16+