The Papanin district in Baku, Azerbaijan, was to be demolished several years ago. While its inhabitants keep waiting in vain for the demolition and for the relevant compensation, the life in the district moves in its own, slow pace. The black-and-white meditative film recounts, against the backdrop of the empty streets, personal microstories about the loss of illusions, the joys of everyday life, encounters of love and death. Together, the fragments of the locals’ lives form a mosaic image of a place soon to be wiped from the face of the Earth.

Papanin

A poetical quotation puts a damper on high expectations of earthly life. Because human beings were not sent to earth but cast out to it. Disappointments are to be expected. In “I Still Talk to You,” Turkan Huseyn illustrates a conversation with her friend. It is about love and the longing to return to the past, about childhood and its no longer existing coordinates in time and space. A melancholy dialogue broken up by brief encounters: stranded looking people who also explain their views of and experiences with love. Meanwhile, the fish in the Caspian Sea are coated in a thin layer of oil that merely needs to be wiped off. It used to be less dirty here, Turkan Huseyn says. When you are a child, everything seems less dirty, her friend replies. A laconic zooming back and forth between inside and outside, in the centre of which a few buckets of blood-red flowers bloom anyway.