A Requiem in Bishkek, the portrait of a city and a meditation on exile, depicts the day-to-day life of an uprooted and isolated man in Kyrgyzstan. Living in a converted hangar in the forest, he finds a way of coping with his precarious existence in the act of filmmaking without a camera. In an amazing and astonishing opening scene, having devoted himself to the meticulous task of drawing, scratching and collaging onto a reel of film, he sits down, humble, next to his projector to watch the fruits of his labour: the worst horrors in history enchanted by the magic of the stroke of a pencil to the sound of a vigorous piano. In his yellow anorak, his ushanka-hat pulled down over his ears, the filmmaker himself plays the main character in his film, a tender, farcical figure whose silence on screen is in sharp contrast to his testimony imbued with a melancholic gravity, narrated off-screen over the images. Words in the form of an elegy that express the painful condition of the refugee in a hostile, humiliating environment. In the fiction’s background, the filmmaker offers a striking, documentary portrait of Bishkek and a country built on the ruins of its Soviet past, tossed around by political instability. In a world submerged by wars and hatred of the Other, artistic creation – in the film and of the film – seems like a survival strategy, a way of turning the exile experience into a poetic act. Like his protagonist, who recycles and cobbles things together with an almost childlike inventiveness, Ray di Sica tries his hand at everything, using both recent digital possibilities and the tricks and techniques of cinema’s early days to compose a requiem full of grace and emotion to the power of images and dreaming. In the museum, “the only place in the world that truly welcomes [his] soul” the character finds his salvation, transported into the landscape of a painting by Isaac Levitan: art is his ultimate refuge.
Louise Martin Papasian