HOMEWARD (aka EVGE): Ukrainian Film Week at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

HOMEWARD brings a Crimean Tatar perspective into Ukrainian Film Week, following a father and son on a journey shaped by grief, duty and the question of where a person belongs after war. Nariman Aliev’s debut feature begins after the death of Nazim, a young Crimean Tatar man killed while fighting in eastern Ukraine.

His father, Mustafa, is determined to take the body back to Crimea for burial according to Muslim tradition. His younger son, Alim, joins him reluctantly, and the journey across Ukraine becomes a tense, quiet reckoning between generations.

Director Aliev avoids grand speeches and lets the road and his camera do the work. Petrol stations, checkpoints, cars filled with silence, a small argument, sudden tenderness. Here you get a taste for Crimea as both destination and open wound, a place that some families belong to, but could never return to unchanged.

Opening Sunday’s Myths & Nightmares After Dark program, HOMEWARD gives the closing day its emotional ground. It screens before SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS and VIY, moving from grief and return into folklore, ritual and the supernatural.