“I am cold and I think / I will never feel warm again.”
— Forugh Farrokhzad’s poem Another Birth (Tavalodi Digar, 1964).
Premiered in Competition this Fall at the 30th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), Isabelle Kalandar’s debut feature Another Birth marked the arrival of a filmmaker whose vision is at once intimate and elemental. Held from September 17 to 26, 2025, the BIFF reaffirmed its reputation as Asia’s premier stage for emerging voices in cinema, a place where new visions first take flight. For Isabelle Kalandar, it became precisely that moment of arrival, the point where a quiet, searching body of work met the world’s gaze.
In Kalandar’s debut feature, Another Birth, the mountainous Shakhdara Valley in Tajikistan serves as both a setting and a state of mind. It is the first film shot in this remote region since 1979, and it carries the weight of that absence: the silence of four decades of unfilmed valleys, the invisibility of communities whose stories have mainly been told elsewhere. Into this silence, Kalandar inserts a tale of yearning, absence, and childhood rupture that feels both intimate and allegorical.
The film’s core is a simple yet devastating conceit: eight-year-old Parastu believes her grandfather, Bobo Ali, is dying of longing for his absent son. Her father has been gone for years, working abroad, unseen and unknown to her. To save her grandfather, Parastu sets out to find the father she has never met, accompanied by her friend Guliston. Their journey winds through mountains, ghostly rivers, and encounters that border on the mythical. What begins as a child’s adventure becomes a parable for loss and resilience in a world where absence is the prevailing condition.
Migration as Structure, Not Exception
What lends the film its quiet force is how seamlessly it situates this personal narrative within a larger social phenomenon: the absence of a patriarch in post-Soviet Tajikistan. Since the 1990s, labour migration has become a survival strategy, with hundreds of thousands of men sending abroad in search of work, primarily to Russia. By 2024, remittances were expected to account for nearly half of Tajikistan’s GDP, among the highest ratios in the world. The macro-numbers are staggering, but the household arithmetic is starkly intimate: remittances pay for food, medicines, school fees, and modest repairs. They keep families afloat while simultaneously hollowing them out.
For women, migration has been a double-edged sword. In practice, they become the managers of the household: handling transfers, raising children, negotiating with in-laws. Yet patriarchal scripts endure, and loyalty to the absent husband is both demanded and policed. The father’s authority lingers even as his presence evaporates. In this paradox, the figure of the father becomes more symbolic the longer he is gone, revered through rituals of remembrance and the promise of return, even if that return never comes.
Children inhabit this contradiction most acutely. Studies show that those left behind often grapple with anxiety, learning gaps, and behavioural challenges, compounded by the stigma of being “without a father.” But they also develop strategies of imagination to bridge the unbridgeable. Parastu’s quest to find her father is precisely this: a child’s attempt to restore balance by turning absence into adventure. The film grants her that imaginative agency, while never sentimentalising its futility. Shukrona Navruzbekova as Parastu is flawless. Bound by a lifelong connection to the village, Shukrona inhabits the role with a quiet truthfulness; her character seems to grow from the same soil that shaped her own life. The film’s world breathes through real villagers who play themselves, their gestures and silences unstudied. Only the mother, portrayed by the director, Isabelle Kalandar, comes from elsewhere, carrying into the story the distance and solitude that define her character.
Women as Silent Witnesses
If Parastu embodies innocence cut short, her mother represents another register of absence: the silent witness whose loneliness is unspoken yet all-consuming. Kalandar draws the mother with deliberate restraint. She is apathetic, sometimes careless in her dismissal of Parastu’s fears, but the viewer senses the depth of her emotional exile. She embodies the fate of countless women in Tajik villages: abandoned without acknowledgement, tethered to patriarchal ideals that elevate the man even as he vanishes.
Parastu tells her mother that the fairy who appeared to Father was a kind one. The mother, weary and sceptical, dismisses it as a child’s fancy. But Parastu persists, saying that even her grandfather had seen the same vision. The mother turns away and answers quietly, “The fairy comes only to good people.” Later, around the twenty-eighth minute, she repeats the sentiment in a harder key, telling Parastu with the calm of resignation, “Good men are hard to find.” The fairy, a figure from Central Asian mythology, serves as a narrative device that connects the film’s personal story to a broader cultural context.
Another Birth resists melodrama. There are no tearful monologues, no cathartic confessions. Instead, the mother’s distance becomes its own narrative, an emotional economy of survival that speaks volumes through absence. In this sense, the film’s minimalism mirrors its subject: lives defined not by what is present but by what is missing.
This theme also has literary antecedents. Kyrgyz writer Chinghiz Aitmatov, whose Jamila (1958) and The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years (1980) remain Central Asian touchstones, also placed women at the centre of stories shaped by absent men, weaving myth into the everyday. Kalandar’s mother figure, quietly enduring yet broken, feels like a contemporary echo of Aitmatov’s women: resilient, but forever negotiating with absence.
Between Neorealism and Myth
Stylistically, Kalandar positions her work at the intersection of neorealism and myth. She embraces the techniques of Italian and Iranian neorealism: non-actors, on-location shooting, unvarnished environments, and a narrative economy that prioritises silence over speech. However, she refuses to confine herself to documentary plainness. Ghostly rivers, spectral figures, and a child’s encounter with a fairy tilt the narrative towards the allegorical, creating a film that feels both precise and expansive. It never lectures, never sentimentalises. Instead, it lingers on the textures of absence, a child’s imagination, a mother’s silence, a valley’s echo.
This dual register, realism grounded in social fact and myth tinged with the supernatural, mirrors the lives of those left behind. Migration is both an economic reality and a metaphysical wound. Children interpret it through stories; women endure it through silence. Kalandar allows both registers to coexist, neither cancelling the other, thereby enriching the film’s narrative and the audience’s understanding of the characters’ experiences.
The cinematography by Janis Brod accentuates this balance. The Shakhdara Valley is filmed not as an exotic landscape but as an inhabited presence. Streams, stones, and skies are given equal attention as the faces of women and children. The result is a geography that breathes — a land that both nurtures and imprisons, abundant and barren at once.
A Cinema of Departure
I met Isabelle Kalandar in Dubai a few weeks before her film’s premiere in Busan. In conversation, she spoke with the clarity and conviction of a young filmmaker already attuned to the moral weight of images. That brief encounter offered a glimpse into her cinema’s inner compass—quiet, disciplined, and guided by a deep belief in the power of restraint.
Isabelle Kalandar belongs to that rare lineage of filmmakers who approach cinema not as an industry but as an inquiry into being. Based in New York and trained in Film and Media Studies at Columbia University, she has spent the past three years developing her On Exile Trilogy, comprising The Wall (short, 2025), Another Birth (feature, 2025), and Still We Must Live (feature, forthcoming 2026). The trilogy charts a cartography of displacement: not exile as a geographical concept, but exile as a state of mind, a permanent estrangement from the certainties of home and belonging.
Kalandar’s Another Birth, supported in post-production by the Doha Film Institute, is the first full-length realisation of this vision. The film’s pared-down realism, its use of non-actors and on-location shooting, recall the quiet humanism of De Sica and the metaphysical lyricism of Kiarostami, yet it stands apart from imitation. It carries the rigour of lived experience that Werner Herzog once demanded of his students—his conviction that art must first pass through the trials of life. Kalandar has made that dictum her method, allowing her film to emerge not from technique but from witness.
In Another Birth, silence is not absence but structure; longing becomes a language spoken between generations. Every frame is tuned to the frequency of what is missing—the father who has left for work abroad, the mother who recedes into solitude, the child who must learn to name the void. By the film’s end, Parastu’s journey resolves not in reunion but in recognition: that the absent father exists only as an expectation, an inherited myth. What ends is not the journey but childhood itself.
Yet Kalandar’s cinema refuses despair. Like the river that carries the mother into its current, her film moves between ruin and renewal. It is at once personal and political, regional and universal—a meditation on how global economies unmake families, and how the residue of that loss becomes the grammar of daily life. In its restraint, Another Birth achieves an uncommon eloquence. It listens until silence turns audible. In doing so, Kalandar affirms that in the vocabulary of exile, even absence can find its own voice.
Innocence, here, is not a stage but a luxury that cannot be afforded.
Another Birth is not simply a Tajik story, nor merely a post-Soviet story. It is a meditation on how global economic forces fracture the most intimate of human bonds, leaving families to learn to live with absence as their daily ritual. In its restraint, the film achieves profundity. It does not declaim; it lingers. Kalandar has given us a film that listens so intently to silence that absence itself begins to speak.
Narrative Armature: Between Farrokhzad and Ferdowsi
Kalandar’s Another Birth is built on two foundations of Persianate storytelling. One is the feminist modernism of Forugh Farrokhzad, a poet who wrote with honesty about solitude, loss, and renewal. The other is the mythic world of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, where kings and tyrants shape the fate of nations.
Farrokhzad’s voice enters the film through her poem Another Birth, whose verses express the inner life of a woman left to endure absence. Her words frame the story from within, giving emotional and philosophical weight to the silence of the mother and the awakening of the daughter. The film’s imagery of coldness, rivers, and renewal reflects Farrokhzad’s language of longing and transformation.
Alongside this, Kalandar draws on the ancient moral imagination of Ferdowsi. The child’s narration, “Once upon a time, in a beautiful kingdom lived kind and pure-hearted people,” recalls the opening of a legend. It evokes the tale of Zahhāk, the king whose corruption and hunger brought ruin to his land. In Another Birth, the absent father is not a tyrant, but his disappearance creates a similar void. The order of the household, like the order of the kingdom, begins to decay.
Through this double inheritance, the film bridges the gap between poetry and legend, the intimate and the epic. Farrokhzad gives voice to inner exile, while Ferdowsi supplies the moral frame of a world undone by absence. Together they form the armature of a story about loss, endurance, and the search for renewal.
The River and the Mother: An Ending Without End
The closing image of Another Birth lingers like a question left deliberately unanswered: the mother, long defined by her silence and solitude, walks into the river. After Parastu’s futile search for her absent father, after the grandfather’s decline and the daughter’s premature awakening, the family seems suspended in its fracture. Then the mother, almost without drama, turns toward the water and enters it, step by step, until the current folds around her.
On its surface, the gesture might appear as despair: the final surrender of a woman hollowed by abandonment. However, in the film’s mythic register, the act resonates more broadly. The river has accompanied Parastu throughout her journey, ghostly and spectral, an elemental border between childhood and adulthood, presence and absence. To enter it is not only to die but to cross, to pass into another realm where grief is no longer borne alone but absorbed by nature itself.
The ambiguity is essential. Kalandar refuses to tether the scene to a single reading, instead allowing it to oscillate between tragedy and transcendence. The mother’s immersion is both annihilation and purification. In the idiom of Central Asian folklore, rivers are liminal spaces of cleansing, of trial, of rebirth. In the idiom of Forugh Farrokhzad’s poetry, whose verses braid through the film, the river is coldness itself, the impossibility of warmth, yet also the site where “another birth” becomes imaginable.
Kalandar’s use of the river places her in dialogue with a larger cinematic tradition. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983), the long sequence of a man carrying a candle across water embodies spiritual burden and transcendence, a test of endurance at the threshold of faith. Kalandar’s mother, stepping into the current, carries no candle but the weight of silence; her movement is equally ritualistic, a gesture without resolution but filled with metaphysical density.
Closer to home, Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov’s Luna Papa (1999) opens with water as a site of fable and rupture: the girl’s night encounter near a river sets her on a path shaped by absence and absurdity. Where Khudojnazarov uses water as a portal to surreal comedy, Kalandar reclaims it as a threshold of grief, registering not whimsy but the dissolution of self in the face of unendurable absence.
Even outside the post-Soviet sphere, one can recall the spectral rivers of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s cinema, such as Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), where water connects the living and the dead, or the lake in Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975), where reflection becomes memory itself. In this lineage, water is never simply natural; it is a metaphysical conductor, carrying memory, absence, and transformation.
For Another Birth, the mother’s immersion radicalises the film’s central absence. It is no longer only the fathers who depart, vanishing into distant economies, leaving women and children behind. The women, too, find their own departure, not a geographic exile but an existential immersion. The valley, which began as cradle and cage, finally claims its own.
Poet Forugh Farrokhzad’s “Another Birth” breathes through images of cold earth, dying gardens, and the faint promise of renewal. The mother’s walk into the river carries this double current: the chill of desolation and the whisper of rebirth. In the cold water where warmth is lost, a new life quietly begins to stir.
For Parastu, the child who bears witness, the river becomes both a source of loss and an inheritance. It severs her childhood yet also transmits the possibility of resilience: to imagine, to survive, to be reborn in solitude. The mother is gone, or transformed, or both, but what remains is the poem’s final promise: that from coldness and absence, another birth may still emerge.
The mother walking into the river is the final allegory: absence absorbs her, but in her immersion, there is also the possibility of renewal. She becomes both the victim of migration’s loneliness and the emblem of another birth. The ending links this film to the larger motif of exile in the trilogy, showing that departure is not only geographic (the father leaving for Russia) but also existential (the mother leaving for the river). But for the audience, it resists closure. We are not given resolution, but a mythic gesture that suspends the story between despair and rebirth.
