“Sughra and her sons” in the CinemaPlus.

January 19th is the release date of “Sughra and her sons” directed by Ilgar Najaf in the CinemaPlus.

The film, jointly produced by Baku Media Center and “Buta Film” companies, tells the fate of people living in the villages at the rear front in Azerbaijan during the Second World War.

It should be noted that European experts were among the film crew, which was mostly filmed in Sugovushan village of Dashkasan district.

It was written by Ilgar Najaf, Asif Rustamov and Roelof Jan Minnebo (Netherlands), the director of photography is Ayhan Salar (Germany), a member of the European Film Academy, and the sound director is Michael Menzke (Germany).

Ilgar Najaf notified that the script of the film was created on the basis of approximately 12-13 stories: “Some of them happened to my own family members, I mean, grandfathers. Namely, they were forced to leave their places of residence because they were the subject of repression. A great number of human lost occurred during those displacements. Some of them are the stories of people I know, I have written them as they told it.  We worked on the script with Asif Rustamov at the initial stage, then sent it to Rolf (Rolf Jan Minneboo-ed.). Many of the stories we included  have taken place during the war years. So for this reason, the material inevitably directed us to that period.”

The director also mentioned that it happened about 85 years ago and that means decorations, costumes and specific details of the period: “Since the budget was small, it was difficult to organise all this.The idea of shooting the film in black and white came forward because of that. We thought that this form would help us to describe accurately that time. And, of course, we trusted our director of photography Ayhan Salar. As a director and director of photography, we understand each other very well. In terms of sensing the story, we had really good internal consensus on defining the image. So it is very comfortable to work with him. Thus, all that I listed strengthened the idea of adjusting to 1941-1945.”

Along with Gurban Ismayilov, Gunash Mehdizadeh, Khalida Guliyeva, Ilgar Jahangir, Rasim Jafar, Aydan Hasanzadeh, young actors such as Humbat Ahmadzadeh, Pasha Mammadli, who made their debut, also starred in the film.

The film was nominated for the “Best Screenplay” award at the Kerala International Film Festival held in India, the “Worlds of filmmaking” section of the Turkish-German Film Festival held in Nuremberg, Germany, at the XIV Asia and Pacific Countries Screen Awards. It was also awarded with the a special diploma of the jury at the Southeast European Countries Film Festival held in Los Angeles

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