Thus Spoke the Wind by Maria Rigel is playing at this year’s Karlovy Vary, in the Proxima Competition. In a remote Armenian village, Hayk (Albert Babajanyan), an introverted young boy, struggles to fit in with his peers, who bully him believing this will toughen him up and help him earn his place among them. His aunt Narine (Lusine Avanesyan) is raising Hayk as her own, but when his young mother, Anahit (Annika Abrahamyan), comes back home after a long spell abroad, the fragile equilibrium keeping everything together is thrown into disarray.

The film is mostly focused on the difficulty that certain people – or rather, groups of people or entire ecosystems – experience when adapting to new elements, especially when the latter are represented by people who are seen as overly different, or even dangerous. Anahit, being young and relatively carefree, shakes up the preconstructed order in the village. Her bright-red hair, on which the camera lingers with some inquisitive pleasure, even during the process of her dyeing it, easily incurs the anger (mixed with a good dose of envy and misunderstanding) of everyone who comes into contact with her.

Aleksey Shevchenko’s editing stays fixated on certain scenes, with shots that are prolonged to enhance unsettling feelings in most cases and, less frequently, a sense of familiarity or protection. In most shots, Ayrat Yamilov’s cinematography stands out as perhaps the most compelling and accomplished element. The visual composition elevates the atmosphere, capturing the mood and emotion with remarkable finesse. Highlighting the strong tint of Anahit’s locks against the predominantly dark – or green – palette of the backgrounds is a winning choice, creating a vivid and deliberate visual tension within the frame. This chromatic contrast also works on a figurative level, especially when placed alongside Narine’s black hair, which subtly serves to represent the rigidity of the status quo.

In contrast, the screenplay emerges as the film’s least convincing component. While the characters are portrayed with care and the performances are generally effective, the writing leaves them somewhat underdeveloped. If greater attention had been paid to psychological nuance and narrative depth, their motivations and inner lives could have been rendered more fully. As it stands, the script occasionally leans too heavily on the mood and sensations generated by the atmosphere, rather than on a solid foundation of character development.

This approach is not inherently problematic, but in this particular case, it contributes to a lingering sense of incompleteness from a narrative point of view. As a result, the storytelling, while rich in visual and emotional resonance, fails to feel fully successful. That said, there are elements that significantly elevate the experience: most notably, the evocative score by US composer Steve Brand. His compositions skilfully underscore the film’s atmosphere, adding emotional texture and helping unify the mood established by the technical team.

Thus Spoke the Wind was produced by Armenia’s Ema Production and is sold internationally by Antipode Sales International.