The cinema of Tajikistan has been perpetually minimised, and occasionally marginalised, throughout the central Asian country’s history. It’s a country of more than 10 million people – a number that surpasses the populations of all three former Soviet Baltic states combined though Tajik cinema output (and certainly, the recognition) flounders in comparison to even the cinema of Estonia, a country of just 1.3 million. A good chunk of the difference can be explained away in economics and politics: the Tajik government have not been as supportive of the arts as their democratic former Soviet peers and they maintain a gate of censorship that creates additional barriers. Even more of this disparity can be laid on the community of global cinephiles who have not given films like The Little rother their due. The 1989 debut feature from the then 26-year-old Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov comes on the precipice of the USSR’s collapse and an uncertain future for his small central Asian country. The new restoration by Veit Helmer-Filmproduktion is helping to correct this long-standing neglect.
Khudojnazarov is uncontroversially the most recognisable and distinguished filmmaker from Tajikistan. He, like nearly every one of his Soviet filmmaking peers, was reared in the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), now the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, in Moscow. His 1993 film about a woman returning home to Dushanbe after the fall of the union, Kosh ba kosh, became the only Tajiki film to ever win the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival. And following in the footsteps of that film, The Little Brother is a travel film with a defying political undercurrent. Teenage boy Farukh (Firus Sasaliyev) takes his little brother Azamat (Timur Tursunov) across the republic by train to visit their father who works near the Afghan border.
Like many great train films, the geographical progress of the trip works metaphorically to represent the character development of the young boys. Their stops are punctuated with non-professional actors and creative image compositions that refuse to conform to the standards of the era, giving it the air of the “new wave” films that swept through Europe in the 1960s. The tactility of the production and its interest in the lives of the youth speak to a filmic language that more closely resembles François Truffaut than most of the major figures most associated with the VGIK: Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Dovzhenko, or Sergei Parajanov. It’s also shot entirely in black and white, and because of the technological and economic disparity of screen, one could easily mix up this 1989 picture for one a few decades older.
The fraternal and parental dynamics could be understood, particularly in retrospect of the Tajikistani Civil War, on a symbolic level with the wealthy and absentee father in the role of the USSR (or perhaps, more simply, Russia), and the two boys as the Tajikis torn apart struggling to make ends meet in the face of national uncertainty. The themes of torn loyalties and self-pursuit help the case for this political analogy. The intentions of the elder brother – to abandon his younger brother, leaving him with his father – play a key role in this interpretation, though the pending civil war was unknown to Khudojnazarov. Firuz Sabsaliev, the actor who played Farukh, made such connections to the war explicit in his 2023 interview with Klassiki. “That scene with the father, when we fight, it means a lot. At that time, that was the message society was receiving. And to go against one’s father – that’s not in our culture, that’s not how we were raised,” the actor noted, without making any exceptions for the father’s absenteeism. “Nonetheless, Bakhtyar ran with that theme because that’s what was happening then. Then there was a total collapse, it wasn’t just that we no longer respected our fathers: during the civil war there was such chaos.”
The film is shot in Russian rather than Tajik, but that doesn’t prevent hyper-locale influences from leaving their mark — an act of political resistance itself. During Perestroika, the Islamic nationalist forces that, in 1993, would eventually become the United Tajik Opposition began to bubble, and ethnic enclaving intensified. The vacuum of power created a period of tempestuous opportunism. Khudojnazarov does not hide this heritage in Brother. The religious and local expressions of the overwhelmingly Islamic majority of Tajikistan would have been more guarded just a few years earlier than in 1989, and surely the more “Salam alaikum”s in a film, the less likely it would have been approvable in a pre-Perestroika government. It’s rare to see so many nods to Islamic heritage in a Soviet film, even if such nods are little more than shorthand greetings and quips.
Georgi Dzalayev’s cinematography looks too experienced to come from a DoP with such a critically unrecognised filmography. He shoots both people and nature with an eye that sees the best and most beautiful in what lies before him, not too unlike Satyajit Ray’s cinematographer Subrata Mitra in the canonical Apu trilogy. The infrequent train stops make his job easier by offering up the gorgeous natural elements of the countryside that Dzalayev can’t resist. Brother never quite approaches the poetic traditions that had not too long past subsided in both Ukraine and the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, though the powerful and patient outdoor imagery certainly borrows a note or two from the poetic tradition(s). The black and white entombs the story of the two boys into a clever political past where destiny feels more locked in place than a scenic and colourful picture would have pulled. It’s also frankly an impossible task to locate a boring shot.
After viewing Brother, it will become clear that the only reason Khudojnazarov isn’t better known to cinephiles all over the world is because of one reason and one reason only: accessibility. And thank the gods of cinema this appears to be changing.
Watch The Little Brother as part of ArteKino Classics 2025 – just click here for more information.
