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. The film was Aliev's debut feature and Ukraine's official Oscar submission for Best International Feature Film. The film became internationally consequential as one of the few feature films centred on the Crimean Tatar community — the indigenous Muslim Turkic population of Crimea, who had been deported en masse to Central Asia by Stalin in 1944 and had begun 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 following the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea — bringing the body of Mustafa's eldest son, killed fighting in the east of Ukraine, back home to Crimea for burial in accordance with the Muslim tradition that requires interment near the family. The film follows their journey, their grief and the complicated political-cultural weight of the destination they are travelling toward.

The film operates simultaneously as road-movie, character study of a father-son relationship, and document of contemporary Crimean Tatar identity. Anton Fursa's photography of the Ukrainian eastern-and-southern landscape, the dialogue performed largely in Crimean Tatar language (one of the few films to use the language at this scale), and the central performances combined into one of the most distinctive recent works of Ukrainian cinema. The film's continuing relevance has only sharpened with the post-2022 deepening of the Russian war on Ukraine.