Déni Oumar Pitsaev’s Cannes-awarded documentary is a lyrical meditation on the dreams of the displaced, as he returns to a valley in the Caucasus in search of a sense of home.
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Imago 2025
Chechnya is just over the mountain from the Georgian valley of Pankisi, but there is no direct route, and it might as well be a world away for the refugees who fled during the wars and have now made new homes as close as they are able to the homeland they so desperately miss. Déni, who dreamed as a child of building a treehouse in Chechnya, has inherited a small patch of land in Pankisi, and travels there from France with sketched out architectural plans to scope out whether he can feasibly construct a residence there.
Déni Oumar Pitsaev won several awards in Cannes for his subtle, poetic and personal documentary, which is full of searching questions about what dreams and freedom really mean for those who are lost without a homeland. As the call to prayer sounds out throughout the day from the local mosques, and the trees teem with natural life, he reconnects with relatives and must reconcile the gulf in values that has grown between them with an unmistakable sense of recognition and belonging, and the traumatic fear and persecution that have indelibly marked the family’s history. — Carmen Gray