Autumn

Sentenced to jail in 1997 as a university student aged 22, Yusuf is released on health grounds 10 years later. He returns to his village in the eastern Black Sea region, where he’s welcomed only by his sick and elderly mother. It turns out that his father died while he was in jail and his older sister got married and moved away to the city. Economic factors mean that it’s almost exclusively old people who live in the mountain village, and the only person Yusuf sees is his childhood friend Mikail. As autumn slowly gives way to winter, Yusuf goes with Mikail to a tavern where he meets Eka, a beautiful young Georgian hooker. Neither the timing nor circumstances are right for these two people from different worlds to be together. For all that, love becomes a final desperate attempt to grasp life and elude loneliness – for Yusuf at least. For Eka, Yusuf is something like a character from the pages of a Russian novel: a character who inhabits a faraway world and a faraway time. With the 1990s as a backdrop, the film at once documents and criticises a slice of recent history, exposing the irony, ruthlessness and reality of the period. —sonbaharfilm.com