Short film (27 min) / VHS transfer Country of origin: Unknown (possibly post-Soviet, Balkan, or Anatolian) Language: Unidentified dialect (referred to as "Okru" in catalog notes) Status: Lost / partially recovered
For the OKRU participants in 1994, steeped in the binary logic of problem-solving, the film’s central tragedy would have resonated on multiple levels. The first is the tragedy of . The shepherd, whose name we never learn, reduces his daughter to a weapon. He silences her voice, erases her gender, and programs her with a hateful ideology. This is a chilling metaphor for the Soviet state’s treatment of its citizens, particularly its youth: molded for a single purpose, stripped of individual identity, and taught to see the world through a lens of paranoid dualism (us vs. them, victim vs. oppressor). By 1994, this system had crumbled, but its psychological aftereffects remained. The OKRU students, brilliant products of that system’s educational rigor, were likely confronting the question: Had they been trained as instruments, too?
The story begins with a brutal act of violence: four Ottoman soldiers rape and kill the wife of a shepherd named Karaivan. Consumed by grief and a desire for revenge, Karaivan decides to raise his young daughter, Maria, as a boy. He teaches her to fight, hunt, and live with a heart hardened against the world, specifically targeting the men who destroyed their family.
: Maria’s forced transition into a "son" serves as a powerful commentary on survival and the roles imposed by patriarchal trauma.
