22/02/2023 - BERLINALE 2023: Chechen filmmaker Malika Musaeva’s feature debut is a steely and increasingly desperate drama of entrapment and release

The group of new, emergent Russian directors who were mentored under Aleksandr Sokurov share one particular aspect in common. Beyond their oppositional attitude to the country’s mainstream values (which has never been a given for major Russian filmmakers), in present times, they’ve found themselves living and working outside their homeland, which, given the current war on Ukraine, could be an indefinite state of affairs.

Following the Cannes breakthroughs of Kantemir Balagov and Kira Kovalenko (who have both fled Russia to settle in the USA), it’s now the turn of Malika Musaeva, who has brought The Cage Is Looking for a Bird [+see also:
trailer
interview: Malika Musaeva
film profile], her feature debut, to the competitive Encounters section of the Berlinale – the first Chechen-language film overall to premiere at an event of this magnitude. Whilst it’s not a fully realised work narratively or, especially, thematically – which is understandable, with Musaeva still completing a final postgraduate degree at Hamburg Media School – it displays consummate filmmaking skill and a real flair for the medium’s visual language, aiming its anger at the country’s religious patriarchy with a sharpness that draws blood.

In character-drawing familiar from so much contemporary festival cinema, our central protagonist, Yakha (Khadizha Bataeva, a first-time actor, like the entire cast), is a resourceful heroine aiming to emancipate herself from a local backwater, where any progress or hope is verboten. Still, Musaeva gladly resists crafting a sentimental, banally empowering arc for her, imbuing the tale with an astringent sense of melancholy, in that existentially harrowing manner so familiar from philosophical Russian cinema and the country’s great doorstopper-length novels. The facial close-ups, achieved with a square aspect ratio framed by vignette-style curved edges, bring this essence home, taking the work to a solemnly poetic crest quite beyond its narrative requirements.

Across its opening act, Yakha is often seen in the company of her high-school friend Madina (Madina Akkieva), wandering around and sometimes childishly rolling down the hills in their village on the outskirts of Grozny, the capital city. There’s something tender and maybe amorous about their bond, especially stemming from Yakha, a factor in their mutual attitudes when faced with courtship and marriage proposals from the local menfolk. In a society that seems intriguingly matriarchal, the exclusively young ages of these men subtly telegraph the historical period, which Musaeva doesn’t initially make clear, as this is a land where culture and expectations have remained uniform for centuries; we are somewhere towards the end of the Second Chechen War, which saw the country’s re-admittance into Russian federal control, and many of the older men have perished in that conflict. The director’s own family fled during this period, when she was a young girl, and her whole piece is marked by this sense of estrangement, with the gap cathartically closed by merely making this film, beginning a cautious reckoning with the past.

As the story reaches its climax, with Yakha attempting to flee the village independently, we learn finally and devastatingly how the “cage” can enclose itself on the bird, however strong-willed the flight.

The Cage Is Looking for a Bird is a production between France and Russia, staged by Hype Studios and sokurov.fund. Totem Films is handling the world sales.