The protagonist
In Nails in My Brain, «a young man goes to the places in which he has strong memories. Each #memory helps him to open a new horizon but no matter how far he goes, he always returns to the same places, same memories, same faces, same questions, same nails on his brain, » says the film’s publicity. Actually, there is not much physical movement in this film. We see a chicken walking on the ground, barely covered with snow. A group of sheep is bleating in front of a wooden door. The protagonist – a man dressed in a black jacket with a hood – never leaves the old farmhouse, where he lies on the narrow wooden bed under the window partly covered by a transparent light blue scarf, or kneels below the door arch, back towards the audience, a pair of boots on his side.
The camera remains immobile too. For the first fifty minutes, the viewer never sees the location in full but only receives bits of information – close-ups of electrical outlets, spider webs covered with dirt, or a wooden stool with, or without, boots on top.
The thought, however, is in constant motion, expressed via voice-over, addressing topics such as, «Weakest hand can turn into the strongest creature with a small camera,» comparing it to #Dostojevski’s «hidden power»: «I can walk like the strongest, happiest man in the world. Because I know it, I feel the «hidden power» in me…with that camera in my hand». #Tolstoi is brought up too: « People live and act partly according to their own ideas, and partly because they are influenced by the ideas of others. The extent to which they do the one or the other is one of the chief things that differentiate men». There is no doubt that we are to believe the protagonist is one of those people not easily influenced by the ideas of others and, as the camera remains focused on the walls or ground, we are overflown by his ideas.
The torments
The voice-over, the same male voice throughout the film, is accompanied by three types of sounds – church bells, a piano playing the Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1, and the sound of the ambient, an isolated farm covered with snow. In this order, repeatedly. Together with the ambient, a depressing black and white rural setting where the only other colour is the orange of khakis hanging on black branches covered with white snow, the sounds further underline the pain, caused by the ideas – nails in the brain – and the torments of the protagonist’s soul: «Sometimes I feel strong like a crazy, smarter than anyone, higher than anyone…. But when I hear something or light goes off momentarily, I become insect because of fear, fell on my knees and start begging ‘forgive me, god, you are the biggest’». Towards the film’s end, the protagonist claims, «I want to be in the middle, neither believer nor non-believer.» This, perhaps, is his worst torment of all, considering the others, starting with praising the beauty caused by pain and «The girl from Sarajevo» episode, where we learn that he was almost destroyed by a look at a woman’s face: «In a woman, in a face, where is this power coming?»
His religion
As the orange of khakis turns into the orange of fire produced by the book pages burning on the wall, the protagonist challenges god: «Is He afraid of Himself?…Is He ugly?…Is He hopeless?…Is He uncertain?…Does He not believe in Himself?…Did He make humans to believe in Him because He lost His own belief?… Is this why He threatens us with hell, with endless torture?…» I find it hard identifying with anyone #burning books#, even if in an act of communication. Not only is Baydarov trying to communicate, but he has also been very successful at it. Born in Baku, #Azerbaijan, he studied film directing with #Bela Tarr# in #Sarajevo and in 2019 participated at the #Berlinale Talents event. His first film Hills Without Names premiered at the Montreal Film Festival in 2018. Until now, he has made seven films, which have shown and won prizes at prestigious film festivals all over the world. When the Persimmons Grew, for example, premiered in competition at #Visions du Réel# in 2019, where it won the Prize of the Interreligious Jury. In the same year, this film also won the Heart of Sarajevo award for the best documentary film at the Sarajevo Film Festival and was screened at the festivals #DocLisboa, #Viennale, and the Torino Film Festival, among others.
the protagonist challenges god
At the Fajr International Film Festival in 2019, Baydarov presented his method: he writes voice-overs while editing, and people he knows in real life are real people in his films also, so «when we want to make a film, the only extra thing out there is the camera.» This explains the speed of his filmmaking and why every film he makes is a documentary. He can even recycle. In Nails in My Brain, for example, the only other face we see is a close up of his mother’s from When the Persimmons Grew.
Some might appreciate the candidness with which Baydarov offers insight into his deepest thoughts in Nails in My Brain, some might admire his ability to create with limited resources and to use the conventions of European art cinema to challenge the foundations it is built on. He surely manages to present the most abhorrent ideas, but never really goes over the limits. But his view, which sees beauty in pain and is afraid of a woman’s face, can only be observed from afar, as an ethnographic study of a strange world.
‘Nails in My Brain’ will screen at 2020 #Cinéma du réel#
