27/02/2023 - BERLINALE 2023: The Chechen filmmaker spoke of the historical resonance of her debut film, and her place in a new generation of directors from the Caucasus

(© Philip Matousek)

Malika Musaeva’s first feature, The Cage Is Looking for a Bird [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Malika Musaeva
film profile], has arrived at a time when we’re once again dealing with the consequences of war in Eastern Europe, leading us to see stories concerning Russia and its neighbouring states through a different interpretive prism. The first Chechen-language film to premiere at a festival of the magnitude of the Berlinale (where it got an airing in Encounters), this is a powerful piece of local storytelling, showing the fruits of a filmmaking education with Aleksandr Sokurov, who also mentored other millennial Russian directors, such as Kantemir Balagov and Kira Kovalenko.

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Cineuropa: When watching The Cage Is Looking for a Bird, one thinks about its connection to Balagov’s and Kovalenko’s first films, and your studies with Aleksandr Sokurov. Does your artistic journey feel like it commenced at the latter’s workshop?
Malika Musaeva: It was in 2010, right after I graduated from school, that I enrolled in Aleksandr Sokurov's master class at the Kabardino-Balkarian State University in Nalchik. One of our mandatory subjects was to make a short film every year. Mr Sokurov himself came to teach at our school once a month regularly, but sometimes for one or two weeks, which is quite a lot for him. We had 12 students altogether, of different nationalities, including one from Bulgaria who was later expelled, unfortunately, and another from Dagestan.

The reason why Mr Sokurov set up his master class was the fact that there was no such thing as cinematography in the Caucasus. So cinema didn't exist, virtually. And that is why he said there must be something done about the development of film there. For our short films, it was always mandatory to make them in the national language of each of the nationalities. And he also insisted on us choosing family-related subjects because he said it was important. So many people do not know anything about how people live in the Caucasus, how they relate to one another or what the family relationship is, even inside Russia. The most important thing is not to focus on violence, but rather to focus on family themes.

How did you locate your cast? They’re all first-time actors, aren’t they?
All of my actors are non-professionals. They're the local people living in a little region, in the village of Arshty, which is on the border between Ingushetia and Chechnya. We had a little casting that we organised in the town of Nalchik, and there were also two young Chechen girls. One of them had experience working in theatre, and that was the moment when I understood it'd be better to work with non-professionals [laughs].

It may sound amazing, but they behaved very naturally, very organically and even professionally. One could say that after two or three days, they already knew exactly what to do, how to stand in front of the camera, how to look at Dmitriy [Nagovskiy], our DoP, which was amazing. And then they played themselves, the two best friends in the film. They really are best friends!

There are climactic sequences where the lead character is attempting to escape from the village furtively. Did you conceive them as a test of her capacity to integrate into a new environment?
It was a very important element of the whole narrative. She's tried many times before that to somehow escape or overcome her circumstances – that physical escape attempt was one of many different efforts to flee. It was also necessary for her to understand that it is not always physically possible to run away, to fully escape. It was necessary for her to do that in order to understand what she would then later decide. It is not always the case that a physical attempt to escape is really a liberation. And she understood that, during that very moment. That is why she returned.

Were you aiming to impart a sense of the Second Chechen War, perhaps on the sidelines of the story and underlying the events that we see, as opposed to majorly driving them?
The cemetery we see is a delicate way of bringing the war into the story and showing the viewer that people still live there in a semi-warlike state. On one of the hills, there's the FSB [Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation], which is the intelligence service, and the Russian army is present. You constantly see lines of trucks driving into and out of the village, doing it very openly. There was no need for it, but still, we wanted to impart this feeling.

This is an even more delicate question: how does the film resonate for you in this era of renewed Russian military aggression? How precisely are you alluding to the unfolding conflict in Ukraine?
It is very important for me to say, first and foremost, that this is not a political film. But of course, it is political in the sense that the most important things human beings have are their life, their freedom and their rights. And of course, the events in Ukraine are tragic. I went through similar things in my own childhood. Many or all of my fellow countrymen have gone through the same. And this is also symbolised in the cemetery scene, where you have these lists of names on the columns, showing all of the men who died during the war.