At Berlinale, Malika Musaeva's film tells about Chechen women's hard fate

Malika Musaeva's debut film "The Cage Looks for a Bird" was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale). This is the only film from Russia and the first in the Festival history entirely in the Chechen language. In the highland villages of Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkaria, as well as in the Malika's native village, locals did not allow making a film on how Chechen women create "cages" for themselves from which it is impossible to escape. According to Malika, the film has no chance of being screened in Chechnya yet.

The film "The Bird Looks for a Cage" (both names of the film are used) tells about the fate of women, an attempts to overcome absence of freedom, namely, the story of a Chechen family living in Ingushetia. The roles are played not by professional actors, but by ordinary local villagers.

According to the "Kommersant", Musaeva said that the film was based on the stories of Chechen women. One of them wants to get a divorce and is fighting for her child; the other is to get married.

The filmmaker spoke about the difficulties she faced when filming. The problem was with the choice of the place: the idea was not welcomed in mountain villages of Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkaria. In Musaeva's native village in Chechnya, "people got scared"; and the filming there was "out of question."

Then, Malika's choice was the village of Bezengi in Kabardino-Balkaria, but, according to her story, "Balkars didn't want the Chechen story to be filmed there." As a result, the filming took place in the village of Arshty.

"I show the female world. It's very difficult for women to exist in Chechnya; they are forced to live according to Adats, under which women have no rights at all: to choose, to speak and even to think. They belong to the family and to the society," Musaeva told the outlet named "Kholod" (Cold).

According to the film director, "women have to follow the rules invented by males."

Earlier, her film "The Bird Looks for a Cage" was announced in the programme of the Cannes Film Festival, but did not get into it, Alyona Shumakova, the festival curator, has explained. According to her story, Musaeva's film is "an unprecedented case for the Chechen cinema and the Caucasian cinema as a whole": a film in the Chechen language made by a woman.