In Between Dying

A sick old lady lies on a bench complaining about her pain and begs her son Davud to go get some medication or she will die. Davud yells that she has to take care of herself, and storms out of the house. “I need to get out of the house to search for my wife and son whom I have never seen before,” he muses off-screen.

Bit by bit, the film shows us he is actually looking for love and happiness in his life. But first he picks up a friend with whom he goes to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, to look for weed. The trip on the motorcycle ends up in a meeting on a hilltop with a stout middle-aged man who is known as the ‘Doctor’. During the deal, they get in a fight with the drug lord. After wrestling with one of the henchmen, Davud shoots the guy and runs. Three other henchmen go after him. He flees to the countryside and has a couple of strange encounters with women. First there is a young woman who tells him she has rabies, then we meet a woman who tells him of her violent husband, and finally we see a young woman in a wedding gown who fled from her arranged marriage.

The trip across the often bleak, desolate and imposing landscapes is frequently interrupted by Davud with a woman in black, a child, and a white horse, which could possibly be an imagined future life. Through voice-over they deliver enigmatic, poetic texts. Here and there a line of text is shown on screen, like the beginning of a new chapter. In the meantime, the Doctor’s henchmen regularly stop on the way to speculate on Davud’s precarious situation. “By killing one person, he saves another,” one of them muses. “A very strange man.” But also quite a strange, fairy-tale film needing interpretation skills.