Every hour, in Kyrgyzstan, a woman is kidnapped to be married by force. Driven by a sense of urgency faced with this dreadful practice, Mirlan Abdykalykov turns his back on complacency: here, there is no long ordeal suffered by women, rather an abrupt and brutal gash in the life of the young nurse Umut, a terrifying upheaval in relationships of love and trust, a heavily burdened human community that tolerates paroxysms of violence and absurdity under the cloak of tradition. Appalled, the film concentrates all the cruelty, all the injustice of a practice that lends the film its title onto a single point that has the voracious density of a black hole. Yet, rigorous and patient, it simply uses this blind force to capture, in the eye of the cyclone, the contrasting portrait of an entire small society that is tragically doomed to self-sabotage. FM
European Premiere
