Educated as an architect, Abed Abest could also have been a painter. His films are creatures that bleed colour and atmosphere. He builds them like moving paintings, with an eye that is at the same time relentless and caressing. Revealed at first with his feature “Simulation”(2017), screened in Berlin and Toronto, Abest arrives in Tallinn with his second feature: an extremely seducing, desperate and smooth piece of art.

During the war between Iran and Iraq, a father lives with her two daughters in a big, strangely haunted house in an almost deserted city near the border. One day, he leaves the girls at home alone in order to participate in a funeral ceremony. That same day, a bombing hits the city. A bomb falls in his garden. From that point on, some sort of ghostly vibration unhinges his own reality, and the world of the dead seems to mingle with the world of living. Through streams of blood and red halos…

Death and dream. Dusk and night. Flesh and ghosts. And most of all, red and dark. A lot of shiny, dense red. The blood and its physical characteristics are almost a second protagonist in this wonderful film. Like a real fil rouge, it structures the tempo of this dreamy fable about an infinite war between phantoms. “Killing the Eunuch Khan” is a masterful work of a young director obsessed with the thin line that separates the time of the physical reality and the otherworldly realm. You’ll discover a new, powerful voice in the already exciting and crowded landscape of contemporary Middle Eastern cinema. Abest’s vision is strikingly beautiful and deeply disturbing. You’ll be led through a delicate nightmare; its ambition is to represent the feelings and sensations of a people who is tired of endless fights and inevitable horizons of destruction. A loop of killers and victims that must be broken, in order to finally wake up…

Dario Vecchiato