Yellow Bride

Gadir is an Armenian painter who, as his wife says, can’t do anything useful and so he decides to let himself be recruited. At least that way he can mean something to the defence of his fatherland. He arms himself with an old rifle and heads for the front, despite objections all round. There he meets the Azerbaijani Artavaz, a man from a neighbouring village, but from the country of the adversary. The experiences of both men acquire a biblical format. Brought together by a whim of fate, they flee from an incomprehensible war, further and further from their dear ones, going nowhere.Ethnic wars, separatism, religious intolerance – they are the symptoms of the illness of human civilisation at the end of the twentieth century. In the last ten years, the Caucasus has again been torn by them. The title of the film refers to an Azerbaijani folk song that is popular through the Caucasus region, also in Armenia (even though the source of the song is disputed). It is about the tragic love of the ‘Bride in Yellow’, a symbol of love, death and fate. In order to tell his pacifist story, Rzayev uses a poetic realism in which he does not concentrate on the expressions of war, but on the human psyche.