‘Imago’ review: Critics’ week doc looks at a Chechen enclave in Georgia

Dir: Déni Oumar Pitsaev. France/Belgium. 2025. 110mins

Chechen filmmaker Déni Oumar Pitsaev directs his personal quest to know his roots, come to phrases together with his childhood traumas and work out his sense of belonging within the affecting documentary Imago. Extra particularly, the movie seems to be at Pitsaev’s summertime go to to the idyllic Pankissi valley within the Georgian Caucasus, the place many Chechens have settled to flee warfare at dwelling, simply throughout the mountains. The director’s Chechen mom has purchased a plot of land for him in Pankissi, whereas his Russia-dwelling father, whom Pitsaev hasn’t seen in eight years, has promised to assist him construct a home there.

Ought to join with audiences on the lookout for shifting human tales

Over the course of practically two hours — a working time which may want adjusting — the pictures could also be pastoral however the points being unearthed and talked about usually are not all the time so sunny. This Cannes Critics’ Week title takes a simple strategy, however ought to join with audiences on the lookout for shifting human tales.

The movie’s early going exhibits 40-year-old Pitsaev being proven round by his distant cousin Daoud, an Olympic bronze medallist (for Georgia) in judo who’s establishing a villa in Pankissi for his household. He’s satisfied that Pitsaev would love a life on this almost-Chechnya as an alternative of in Western Europe (the director grew up in Chechnya, Kazakhstan and Russia after which studied in France and Belgium). Captured loosely by cinematographers Sylvain Verdet and Joachim Philippe, the opening scenes have a way of surprise and discovery that slowly dissipates. 

Launched not a lot later, the director’s mom is fearful about her son, who’s at an age the place he’s already dropping his hair however nonetheless hasn’t married. Certainly, one of many recurring matters of dialog is the truth that Déni remains to be unwed. This means there’s robust societal stress on this religious Muslim enclave to start out a household. It’s potential, in fact, that Pitsaev merely desires to dwell a bohemian single life. However a extra sophisticated fact emerges, rooted in Pitsaev’s lack of robust function fashions within the household and particularly the paterfamilias division. 

Pitsaev’s dad and mom break up when their solely son was nonetheless a child, then his father remarried and had kids elsewhere. Historically, after a divorce in Chechnya, the kids stay with the daddy however Pitsaev grew up together with his mom. This private trauma was then compounded by the 2 Chechen wars of the Nineties, which occurred when Dénis was a younger boy with divorced dad and mom, left to principally fend for himself in the course of the warfare.

When requested about his goals for the longer term, Pitsaev suggests he’d prefer to be completely satisfied as an grownup; a solution that’s heartbreaking, because it means that has by no means occurred earlier than. Whereas the filmmaker has significant, on-camera conversations together with his mom and the ladies of the village about happiness and what that might entail for them, only a few individuals ask Déni the identical questions in return.

Solely Irakli, a good-looking native buddy, appears to know what Pitsaev is experiencing, suggesting that if he stays he is perhaps “protruding” as somebody uncommon, however that might not be a nasty factor. Irakli unwittingly undermines this stance seconds later, when he suggests that every one he himself desires to do is to go unnoticed – once more suggesting that the pastoral idyll is perhaps discovered within the panorama greater than within the strict group dwelling there.  

There’s a subplot a couple of loopy plan for the home that Pitsaev desires to construct on his plot which has metaphorical potential about his outsider standing. However just like the docu’s title, which refers to a growth stage of larvae however which works as a metaphor for inchoate masculinity, this feels an excessive amount of like an mental strategy to materials that’s higher served by easy remark.

The 2 main setpieces are the aforementioned dialog with the ladies of the village and an intimate, long-overdue confrontation between the director and his father, which takes locations in a forest (the latter filmed with admirable restraint). Both of those might have labored as stand-alone documentary shorts. Although editors Dounia Sichov (Return to Seoul) and Laurent Sénéchal (Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall) strive their finest to suit the remainder of the footage round these highlights, there’s a way that both there’s an excessive amount of or not sufficient materials for the movie to all the time really feel balanced and natural. Nonetheless, this peek right into a area and a hardly ever seen piece of latest historical past will certainly discover admirers on the pageant circuit.