The Return of the Projectionist: an ode to cinema and transmission (review)
For his first feature film, Orkhan Aghazadeh signs a documentary as mischievous as it is moving in the footsteps of an octogenarian Azerbaijani trying to bring cinema back to his small village.
Born in 1988 in Azerbaijan, Orkhan Aghazadeh learned cinema in London and it was while returning to his country to shoot his end-of-studies short film that he met by chance Samid, an old projectionist from the Soviet era, who intends to bring the seventh art back to the village in the depths of nowhere where he lives. Without suspecting then that, like his French producers at Kidam, seduced by his short, he would suggest, when he spoke to them about Samid, that he make him the subject of his first feature film.
A documentary tinged with fiction – he sometimes asked those we see in his camera to “replay” moments that they experienced and that they told him – which takes us to the heart of a remote village in the Talyches mountains, somewhere between Iran and Azerbaijan. And more precisely in the footsteps of this octogenarian who dreams of being able to restart the old Soviet projector that he owns to bring together all the inhabitants of this hamlet in front of a big screen.
His quest – which will be joined by a young film buff… and very quickly almost all the villagers – gives birth to this mischievous and moving film, a sort of counterpart to Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, the idea of transmission in addition but with this same desire deep in the heart to celebrate the seventh art and above all the impact that cinema can have on the lives of everyone, advanced film buff as well as absolute layman. All in 80 minutes carried out without downtime and teeming with so many ideas and twists and turns that we regularly believe we are at the heart of a fiction, imagined by the cream of screenwriters.
By Orkhan Aghazadeh. Duration: 1h20. Released January 21, 2026
