Elnura Osmonalieva | Seide / 2015

cutting off childhood pleasures

by Douglas Messerli

 

Elnura Osmonalieva (screenwriter and director) Seide / 2015 [13 minutes]

Kyrgyzstan director Elnura Osmonalieva’s 2015 short film Seide cannot truly be characterized as an LGBTQ movie, particularly since the young girl at the center of this film, Seide (Kaliman Kalybek Kyzy), is not even perhaps aware of her sexuality and certainly not in touch with a conception of “outsider” sex.

     She is simply a young child, growing up in the cold, snow-ridden plains of Kyrgyzstan who loves her horse and enjoys racing through the fields with the local boys. In the US we would describe her as a tomboy, and perhaps ascribe her love of horse-riding to lesbian tendencies. The lesbian astride a horse has long been a common image and a trope represented by the female warrior riding horseback throughout history (one need only think of Joan of Arc or the Germanic legend of the Black Fighter Johanna) to represent outsider and lesbian behavior.

     But here there are no symbols, just acts. Coming of age, Seide suddenly is the subject of her father and a neighbor concerning marriage, and without even telling her, it is decided in the traditional manner that she will marry the boy next door. Even worse, following the tradition of his ancestors, the father (Kanat Abdrakhmanov) intends to slaughter her beloved horse.

     Osmonalieva expresses all of this with the calm of inevitability—after all, what other choices in this isolated world does the young girl have? But it is Seide’s personal revolt against that inevitability which is at the heart of this emotionally touching film.

      Rising early one morning, she rides her horse far into the cold distance, perhaps to a location where she or the horse have never before traveled, with the intention of leaving her animal behind as she sloughs through the cold snow back to her home. She hugs the horse close to her, removes its harness, and tells it to run. She walks off, but when she turns, she sees her beloved animal following. He cannot leave her any more than she can him. “Run. Go!” she insists again and again.  “Go away! Silly beast.” Repeating this several times, she finally falls to a seated position in the snow in desperation, pain, and anger for the situation. Because of her love of the animal, she recognizes now that the horse must die to be replaced by another through her dowry. One wonders if the tradition was not purposely concocted to break off all contact with a childhood that saw no gender borders, and in the process to cut off all childhood pleasures in preparation for the hard life of heterosexual love a female of age will have to endure.

      The final scene shows her dressed as a bride, looking out over the winter landscape with nothing but trepidation for a future that has cost her all she loved.

       Perhaps this is less an LGBTQ work than it is a feminist statement, a sad pliant for all those women whose fates are sealed simply because of where they live. But I can’t help but feel that had Seide grown up elsewhere, in Western Europe perhaps, she would have become another woman than the one to which she has been confined to be in her homeland.

 

Los Angeles, February 26, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).