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The Man with the Fir Tree (1995)

★★ — The Man with the Fir Tree (1995)

A short, parable-driven curiosity from Turkmenfilm, the state studio that continued operating after Turkmenistan's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, though with drastically reduced resources and international reach. Director Ismail Sagir was working in a tradition consciously inherited from the great Soviet-era art cinema, particularly the poetic, image-centred filmmaking of Sergei Parajanov and Andrei Tarkovsky, whose influence spread widely across the republics of the former USSR. That lineage is openly acknowledged here, with a simple folkloric premise (a man born with a fir tree growing from his shoulder) serving as the kind of symbolic, slow-burn material those filmmakers favoured. At just 69 minutes, it sits somewhere between a short and a feature, made during a period when post-Soviet cinema across Central Asia was finding modest new footing without Moscow's funding.

A-Z World Movie Tour Turkmenistan 🇹🇲 https://youtu.be/7kysYS7QdLU?si=foYHgoYHBYHXD3iq A really low res and low quality short movie about a man born with a spruce tree in his shoulder. They try to convince him to remove it but he's worried either he or the plant will die. It's one of these long drawn out arthouse movies they claim in the style of Tarkovsky. They definitely tried to go down that route but realistically it was just a long drawn out very slow paced movie. I didn't REALLY understand exactly what happened.

Rating: ★★ | Year: 1995 | Watched: 2025-09-14

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