I was born in the summer of 1985 in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, as the son of an architect father and an artist mother. I spent my childhood in one of the most difficult chapters of my country’s history. The Nagorno-Karabakh War reached its peak, police officers earned protection money, the crime rate exploded and my father worked as an architect day and night to feed us. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents and on the streets.
I have a strong memory of my father once picking me up from school. It was around 2 pm in the summer of 1993. I was happy to see him. He took my hand and we left the school. He told me we needed to pass by the bread factory, which was right next to my school, to buy bread. When we got home later, it was already dark out. We had stood in the massive queue at the bread factory all day and were afraid not to make it home before the curfew. Whenever we were together, we talked a lot.
As an architect, he had since my childhood sharpened my senses of the space around me. The idea that the space around us is often constructed and thought out has accompanied me since early on. He also showed me how reality can be rearranged, for example, by positioning walls or through the organisation and sequencing of trees and spaces.
Then my father would bring me a fresh white shirt to the train station, where we smoked a cigarette and drank a coffee together before my trip continued.
In 1998, we immigrated to Germany. From my family’s perspective, our time here was much more peaceful and beautiful. We travelled a lot and spent markedly positive years in our apartment in the neighbourhood Ehrenfeld in Cologne, where I grew up. I graduated from high school and had to struggle with bullying. We were all happy about my admittance to film school, my student Oscar and my participation in Cannes. I travelled around the world with my films and sometimes I did not manage to get all the way home. Then my father would bring me a fresh white shirt, that he had ironed, to the train station, where we smoked a cigarette and drank a coffee together before my trip continued.
Until the winter of 2014, when the crushing diagnosis changed everything: small cell carcinoma. Late-phase lung cancer. We all knew it: he would die within 12 months. It felt so unfair and overwhelming. I knew nobody could understand him now; from now on, he was alone with death. A world collapsed around me. This expressed itself in different ways: sometimes in tears, sometimes hyperactively at a party. I fell into the abyss and was like a ghost.
When my father died ten months later, I began a slow journey back to life. When I re-awoke from my numbness one year after he died, I wrote the script. Today, when I look back, I am another person.
Elmar Imanov
