Homeward

Nariman Aliev's Homeward (Evge) was selected for Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2019 and won the Grand Prix at the Odesa International Film Festival the same year. It was Aliev's debut feature and Ukraine's official Oscar submission for Best International Feature Film. It is also one of the few feature films centred on the Crimean Tatars, the indigenous Muslim Turkic people of Crimea, whom Stalin deported en masse to Central Asia in 1944 and who began returning only after Ukrainian independence in 1991.

A Crimean Tatar father, Mustafa (Akhtem Seitablaev), and his surviving son Alim (Remzi Bilyalov) drive across Ukraine in the months after Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea. They are taking the body of Mustafa's eldest son, killed fighting in the east of the country, home to Crimea to be buried according to the Muslim tradition that requires interment near the family. The film follows the journey and their grief, and the political and cultural weight of the place they are driving towards.

It is a road movie and a study of a father and son, and also a record of Crimean Tatar identity as it is lived now. Anton Fursa photographs the landscapes of eastern and southern Ukraine; much of the dialogue is in the Crimean Tatar language, which few films have used at this scale; and the two central performances hold it all together. The result is one of the most distinctive recent Ukrainian films, and its relevance has only sharpened as Russia's war on Ukraine deepened after 2022.