Shanghai, Baku (Şanxay, Bakı)
2015 · 20m · Azerbaijan
Directed by Teymur Hajiyev
Genres: coming-of-age, crime, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, provocative
A boy's casual family footage in an impoverished Baku district becomes a story of love intrigue and blackmail.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Baku kid's home-video diary mutates into blackmail and desire—the premise alone is perverse enough to make you squint, but Hajiyev actually *lands* the tonal whiplash, treating poverty and moral murk with the same deadpan eye most directors reserve for punch lines. Everyone else would've made this earnest or exploitative; he made it *wrong* in exactly the right way.
The film's restraint in framing—how it lets the camcorder aesthetic breathe without fetishizing it as a formal statement—marks a careful lineage awareness between direct cinema and contemporary essay film, though the crime-plot machinery occasionally overwhelms the observational patience the piece initially promises.
The decision to keep the narration flatly factual while the imagery spirals into moral ambiguity—that friction is what transforms found footage from gimmick into genuine estrangement; on a 20-minute and practically no budget, Hajiyev's refusal to guide you emotionally becomes the film's entire engine.