The Stowaways (2023)
½ — The Stowaways (2023)
Azerbaijani cinema remains one of the less-travelled corners of world film, which makes any new release from Baku worth at least a passing look. The country has a modest but persistent filmmaking tradition stretching back to the Soviet era, and in recent years a handful of independent directors have been working in a low-budget, personal register that sits somewhere between social realism and art-house experimentation. The Stowaways (2023) fits that general shape: a short, intimate drama running to just 70 minutes, following a middle-aged woman who heads off on a summer holiday with her closest friend, only for their stay at a boarding house to take an unexpected turn. It is the kind of premise that could sustain anything from a gentle character study to something considerably stranger, and it arrives with no studio banner attached and very little in the way of promotional apparatus.
The film is directed by Rashad Babayev, working with a cast drawn from Azerbaijani talent including Lala Bagirova and Fatima Mammadova in the central roles, alongside Ziya Qocayev and brothers Samir and Zaur Paşayev. Babayev's approach here is clearly one of stripped-back, observational filmmaking: no glossy production design, no conventional narrative scaffolding, and a visual style that leans on handheld camerawork and ambient sound rather than anything more polished or structured. Whether that restraint reads as artistic intention or simple limitation is, fairly obviously, a matter of where you stand on this kind of cinema. For fans of slow, elliptical work from the margins of world film, the film's brevity and rough-edged texture might hold a certain appeal. For everyone else, it is the sort of thing that demands a fair amount of patience and goodwill before it gives anything back. It sits, perhaps uncomfortably, alongside other recent independent films reviewed here, such as Tiger Stripes and Megdan: Between Water and Fire, in representing the kind of low-resource, idiosyncratic filmmaking coming out of smaller national industries in the 2020s, though both of those have considerably more of a narrative foothold than this one appears to offer. It also recalls, in its drama-led ambitions if nothing else, some of the world cinema fare covered elsewhere on this blog, including Sugar Cane Alley and Dhanmalhi, films that prove the form can be done with real emotional weight when the pieces come together.
A-Z World Movie Tour Azerbaijan I'm sorry but this might just be one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I get it. The director is trying to go for some avant garde artistic piece but it's just a selection of short clips taken with a handheld camera that just border on the absurd. A woman washing a chimpanzee type furry with water and then taking it to the beach? A middle aged woman rolling a watermelon up a hill? Random shots of what appears to be an Azerbaijani street... Random shots of sand with ambient low synth noises. Like in sorry but this is just the most pointless waffle.
And look, I want to be fair about this sort of thing, because world cinema in general, and Azerbaijani cinema in particular, deserves the effort. When a film is made on next to nothing, thousands of miles from any major industry infrastructure, I try to meet it halfway. But there is a difference between a film that is rough and a film that is simply not working, and for me The Stowaways falls into the second category with some conviction. The A-Z World Movie Tour is supposed to be an adventure, and sometimes the adventure turns up something genuinely surprising and wonderful from a corner of the world you'd never have thought to look. This, unfortunately, was not one of those times. Some films you finish and think, well, it wasn't for me. This one I finished and thought: fair enough, but I'm not sure it was for anyone.
Rating: ½ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2025-05-25
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
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