Homeward review – Ukrainian road trip is beautiful but bumpy

As we follow two protagonists on a journey from the capital of Kiev to the Russian-occupied territories of the Crimea, Homeward repeatedly returns to images of dusk and dawn, the sunlight curving in red hues across the skies of the Ukrainian plains. Mustafa (Akhtem Seitablayev) and his son Alim (Remzi Bilyalov) are transporting the body of Alim’s brother, Nazim, to the homeland, killed whilst fighting Russian insurgents in Eastern Ukraine. The trip takes longer than expected, and so presents the estranged pair with a chance to reconcile.

As Crimean Tatars, both Mustafa and Alim are keenly aware of their marginalised existence within Russian and Ukrainian life. Long oppressed, their people were deported en-masse from Crimea to present-day Uzbekistan in 1944 on Stalin’s orders, with the entire ethnic group suspected as Nazi collaborators. It is only since the ‘90s and the dissolution of the Soviet Union that Crimean Tatars have begun to return in larger numbers, although the Russian occupation of the Crimea has once again jeopardised that status.

All this historical detail hangs in the background, weighing on the characters but not necessarily spelled out to the viewer. Director Nariman Aliev, himself a Crimean Tatar, is more interested in the interior spaces that form the relationship between father and son. Mustafa is stubbornly conservative and devoutly Muslim, insisting on adhering to Islamic burial rituals for his son and going as far as to exclude Nazim’s Orthodox wife from the process, leaving her in Kiev. A brute he may be, yet we come to realise that his conservatism is as much a defence mechanism and a means of holding onto his precarious heritage. Alim, for his part, is studying journalism in Kiev (in an early conversation we find out that his father doesn’t even know what he’s studying) and is otherwise much more strongly connected to the “Ukrainian” part of his existence, moving far more comfortably between the two worlds.

The journey “home” has different connotations for each of them. For Mustafa, it’s a way of honouring his heritage by giving his son a burial in an ancestral homeland. For Alim, home is a return to conservatism and stifling social constructs, with little economic or cultural opportunity. Over and over, we return to that image of the sun rising and setting, shot by DoP Anton Fursa whose work here displays a keen eye for the strange, ethereal behaviour of the sun’s rays at twilight. It suggests the world turning on its axis, unfeeling towards their plight, but also an endless cycle of histories ending and new days beginning.

The final third sputters out, thanks to a rigid screenplay that allows for too much neatness in the third act. One longs for a changing of the gears in these final moments that never comes, but Aliev’s feature debut nevertheless showcases the work of a sensitive voice. Whilst the basic building blocks of Homeward – the central father-son dynamic and the constant push-pull of modernity and tradition – are broad, its cultural specificity and lyrical cinematography elevate it just enough to recommend.

Homeward is now available on digital platforms.