Mekkege Karai Jol

This portrait of Sulaiman Turdubaev, a Kirgiz villager, was inspired by a recent decision he made: this octogenarian, who had patiently saved all his life to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca, decided to spend his savings on a communal monument to the fallen of the “Great Patriotic War”, to use the Soviet term. The precise and wellchosen framing focuses less on the sacrificial aspect of his gesture than on the way in which he gives meaning to his surroundings. As he is one of the only two surviving war veterans, he cleans the monument’s steps as if the memorial stone were that of a close friend. The shots in the couple’s house happily adapt to the risks of filming (the savoury sequence where the light goes out). They combine an ethnographic document with an ode to passing time, a lasting love. When the husband confides that his spouse is “one year younger than [him]”, the quiver of flattery running through his companion is filmed with a sensitive concern to recreate what Turdubaev calls a life “of peace and harmony”.