24/10/2024 - Set in the mountains of Azerbaijan, Orkhan Aghazadeh’s feature debut is a visually lush, heartwarming contribution to the oeuvre of films celebrating cinephilia

An older man slowly pulls a horse up a mountain slope, revealing a younger man on the back of the animal. But the younger individual isn’t clutching a bag or holding onto the horse itself – instead, he turns and lifts a laptop high in the air, reporting that there’s still no signal. They then continue on up the mountain, deeply immersed in their search. Azerbaijani filmmaker Orkhan Aghazadeh’s debut feature opens with this striking still-camera shot, revealing the lengths to which its subjects are determined to go for their cause: namely, for cinema. The Return of the Projectionist [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which chronicles the eponymous figure’s journey to open a theatre in the town hall, world-premiered in the main competition of Visions du Réel and screened at Filmfest Hamburg before landing at Film Festival Cologne.

That older man is Samid, an Azerbaijani man who formerly worked as a projectionist in the Soviet Union and who lost his young-adult son in a terrible occupational accident. He uncovers his old analogue projector with the goal of reviving cinema in his village, located deep in the Talysh mountains, on the border with Iran. Accompanying him is the eager 16-year-old Ayaz, a young film enthusiast who makes animated flicks using his mobile phone and experiments with makeshift projection technology, with encouragement from Samid. Together, the pair works to finish Ayaz’s short film while also trying to accomplish Samid’s dream of creating the town cinema. In a poignant and amusing role reversal, the elderly man shows up on the teen’s doorstep avidly asking him to help; Ayaz replies that he doesn’t have time and has to work on his own film.

In the movie’s wild goose chase through-line of Samid searching for the correct bulb to fix his broken Soviet projector, he and his friend from the film’s opening scene repeat their routine again, only later in deep snow and at night, bending shrimp-like over the glowing laptop screen to search for the bulb online. In another chuckle-worthy moment, the former projectionist proudly announces that he has even gone ahead and secured a bank card so he can make online transactions, whipping it out on the side of a snowy mountain.

It’s easy to see why cinematographer Daniel Guliyev took home the German Camera Award in the Doku Kino (documentary film) category for his work on the film, which oscillates between absorbing the remote mountain landscapes and the gentle bond of trust between Samid and Ayaz. In a set of almost impossibly composed documentary shots, Guliyev lenses the duo neatly through window frames as they sometimes work solely by the light of a single lamp but are still cast in perfect contrast with their surroundings. At other moments, they frolic amongst the green hills, with the camera set far away so it softly captures Samid and Ayaz in their comfort zones. Guliyev and Aghazadeh also use symmetry to their great advantage to capture curious schoolchildren in neat rows à la Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House?, making the film feel like an eternal tribute to the Iranian New Wave.

The Return of the Projectionist thus firmly settles amidst the growing oeuvre of movies dedicated to a celebration of the medium itself, including meta-films and those related to spectatorship – most recently, in titles such as Arnaud Desplechin’s Filmlovers! [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] or looking back to Tsai Ming-liang’s iconic Goodbye, Dragon Inn. The tender, supportive friendship between the two is perhaps most immediately reminiscent of the relationship in Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 film Cinema Paradiso. Aghazadeh also cultivates a playful yet dedicated sensibility around the cult of cinephilia, like that of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Hello Cinema.

The Return of the Projectionist is a German-French production by Germany’s Lichtblick Film and France’s Kidam. Its world sales are steered by Paris-based Cat&Docs.