Zulfikar Musakov

Doniyor has the supernatural power to heal seriously ill people with incurable pain. Thanks to his ability, not a single sick person remained in his village. Shuhrat Shodmonov, a big businessman from Tashkent, comes to him and asks him to treat his granddaughter.

A girl named Nargiz passed away without her mother. She resembles the mother of a Japanese tourist, who denies it.

The film follows the lives of four upper-class teenage boys in Tashkent, Uzbekistan including the shy son of a famous film director, a chubby cut-up, son of a rich and successful businessman, and a tough aspiring playwright who works after school to avoid his raging alcoholic of a father. The four all live in the same housing complex and go to the same high school, where they fall for a beautiful, tough-as-nails new female student. Within the exotic locale of Uzbekistan, the boys experience the usual "growing pains" as they fall in love, "borrow" the family car, work hard to earn extra money and have too much to drink. A funny, touching slice-of-life comedy-drama.

An elderly Uzbek man living in America one day admits that his soul longs for his native village as it once did. Through deceit or trickery, he manages to get on a plane bound for Uzbekistan. He is driven by nostalgia and a long-brewing plan for revenge against a bloody enemy...

Considering that Musakov’s Abdulladzhan (1991) was dedicated to Steven Spielberg, we might suggest that these four boys embody nothing more complicated than a conflict of youthful innocence with some ominous threat—the basic workings of E.T. (1982) or War of the Worlds (2005), say. That threat, however, is best understood not through vague nationalism or warmed-over socialism, but through the other reference-point of Abdulladzhan—Tarkovskii’s Stalker (1980). Musakov leaves his boys in a simplified radiance so bright and so overexposed that it no longer looks like the skies of sunny Tashkent, but a disturbing, borderless luminosity to match the flat tonal range of Stalker’s “Zone.” Our Uzbek boys are nowhere in particular; this is a broader domain than anything international.

Winter, New Year's Eve, and ...