Genre Drama

The Man with the Fir Tree (1995)

Item: The Man with the Fir Tree
Rating: 2.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★ — The Man with the Fir Tree (1995)

Cinema from Turkmenistan rarely lands on most people's watchlists, which makes The Man with the Fir Tree something of a genuine curiosity. Released in 1995 and produced by Turkmenfilm, the state studio of a country that had only formally gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the film arrives out of a moment of considerable cultural transition. Post-Soviet Central Asian cinema was finding its feet in this period, caught between the legacy of Soviet-era filmmaking institutions and the pull of national identity and indigenous storytelling. The film sits, at least in intention, within a tradition of poetic, symbolist cinema associated with directors like Sergei Parajanov and Andrei Tarkovsky, a lineage that prizes imagery, atmosphere and metaphysical weight over conventional narrative momentum. It is a tradition with some genuinely extraordinary works to its name, and one that has inspired filmmakers well beyond the Soviet world, as you can see in a film like Salaam Cinema, another 1995 film that plays with form and reality in its own distinctive way.

Directed by Ismail Sagir, The Man with the Fir Tree runs a lean 69 minutes, which by arthouse standards is practically a short feature. Its premise is parable-like: a man has a tree growing from his shoulder, and those around him press him to have it removed, while he fears that doing so might mean the end of either himself or the plant. It is the sort of high-concept allegorical setup that can work brilliantly in the right hands, the kind of image that lodges in the memory long after the film has finished. The principal cast includes Oraz Amangeldyyev, Aman Gelen, Owez Gelen, Ogultach Hany, and Nury Hudaikuliyev, none of whom will be familiar to most Western audiences, though that is arguably part of what makes cinema from this corner of the world worth seeking out. For further context on the slower, more meditative end of fantasy filmmaking, it is worth having a look at what The Snow Woman and Viy do with folkloric and supernatural material, both reviewed here on the site.

Whether the film succeeds in its ambitions is, of course, another matter entirely. Tarkovsky comparisons are easy to make and rather harder to live up to, and slow-cinema aesthetics require a certain precision and control to land rather than simply drift. The film has circulated in fairly limited form, and the version most accessible online is, by most accounts, of fairly rough technical quality, which does not exactly help a film that is presumably trying to create a particular visual and atmospheric experience. It is the kind of film that deserves to be considered on its own terms, even if those terms are, let us say, modest.

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.

I will say, the murkiness of it all is not entirely surprising given the circumstances of production and distribution, but it does make it hard to give the film the full benefit of the doubt. There is something genuinely interesting buried in that central image, a man bound to a living thing, afraid that separation means death for one or both of them. That is rich material. Whether this particular film excavates it satisfyingly is a different question, and if you have sat through other films from this era that reach for poetic ambiguity and occasionally just produce plain confusion, you will know the feeling well. I have had a similar experience with other films from the same period, including The Sixth Sense (1999), which is unsettling in a very different but equally unresolved way. Sometimes a film leaves you uncertain, and you are not sure whether that uncertainty is the point or just the result of the thing not quite working. With The Man with the Fir Tree, I suspect it is a bit of both.

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

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