Azerbaijani director Hilal Baydarov returns with his distinct brand of visual poetry and existential musings in his third feature.

According to former cop and convicted kidnapper Davud, an old legend about guiding cranes home through dark forests with carefully placed lanterns doubles as a trap for hunters to locate them. That’s an apt metaphor for both characters and Crane Lantern (‘Durna Cıragı‘) itself, Azerbaijani writer-director Hilal Baydarov’s second release in roughly a year, after the Venice bow of In Between Dying in 2020.

Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas and actor Danny Glover return as producers on some fairly familiar material. If it weren’t already clear from his first two features, Crane Lantern cements Baydarov’s place among current cinema’s most ethereal, existentially focused artists, one who aggressively steers in the opposite direction from linear narrative. Baydarov has quickly created a filmic brand (for lack of a better word) for himself, inspired by his former teacher Bela Tarr and marked by stories rooted in legend (like the Siddhartha tale from Dying), protagonists named Davud, long static shots of Azerbaijan’s scarred earth and poetic voiceovers that many would dismiss as pretentious. Just as many would call Baydarov’s work dreamy and compelling, and that’s going to carry Crane Lantern to more than its share of festivals after its world premiere at Tokyo.

The plot, such as it is, is a carefully constructed series of quasi-vignettes, in which law student Musa (Elshan Abbasov) examines the case of a kidnapper, Davud (Baydarov regular Orxan Iskandarli), in custody for abducting four women, none of whom want to press charges. The meetings between Musa, Davud and his ostensible victims unfold against impeccably composed forest idylls, shimmering, grasshopper-dotted oil fields, rocky central Asian deserts and derelict buildings that often reflect internal thoughts and emotions, though whose thoughts and emotions they reflect remains unclear.

The women Davud kidnapped are also the conduits through which the film’s big ideas are examined, ideas ranging from crime, justice and punishment to the nature of reality (imprinted on almost every shot), love and humanity — itself an unspoken question, expressed by almost all the characters when they recite lines from a verse: “I am human, and nothing about being human is strange to me.” There’s a fluidity to their identities; only some are identified by name, lending a universality to the themes. Baydarov doubles down on this commonality by directing his actors — Nigar Isayeva, Sada Hasanova, Aytakin Mirisova and Rana Asgarova — to new heights of shared melancholy, frequently shot in luminous close-up. They’re convinced Davud has made their lives better somehow, even as he exists on the periphery of their memories.

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Tokyo recently became the first film festival in Asia to sign the Collectif 50/50 pledge

What are your thoughts on that and how the movement towards gender equality is progressing in the Japanese entertainment industry and how much has it changed in the decade since your debut?

It has been a situation where basic rights that people should have possessed, they didn’t, including as that relates to gender. So the situation is that finally what should have been the natural state of affairs is becoming reality. In a sense, we’re just getting towards the start line, but it’s important that more people are now conscious of these issues and this is beginning to happen. Of course, this is very complex and cuts across all areas of society and life, not just the entertainment business.

There are a number of influential and talented creators such as Shinji Aoyama and Hirokazu Kore-eda who are very conscious about this and reflect that in their filmmaking and the things they say. That is really heartwarming, that it’s not only women fighting for this but men supporting it as well.

I have felt changes in the industry. As an actor, we tend to be treated well, but when I look at the crew and other staff… there have always been more men, and the proportion of films that I’ve been in that had female directors is extremely low. I think people are more conscious about this and the environment is getting better, but there still remains a lot of work to be done.

How do you see the rise of streaming services impacting Japan’s film industry and would you consider an offer from one of the platforms?

Actually, I’m working on a production for one of them now but it’s not announced yet so I can’t talk about it. I feel like it is the shift to a new era that we’re in. I see the merits of being able to see a lot of different movies and it being easy on the wallet. It makes films more accessible; you can watch them on your phone on the train. When I started my career, the films I was in could only be seen in the cinema, and I do feel that they were made to be watched that way. If you see them on a phone or even a TV screen at home, some elements of a film can’t be 100 percent experienced. Watching a film in a cinema is an experience that can have an impact on your life — it’s not just taking in data.