Brothers

Seventeen-year-old Farukh and his lisping, mischievous kid brother Azamat (known as 'Bunny') leave their leaky home in a Tajik village and hitch a ride on a goods train to the small town where their father works as a doctor. But he and his girlfriend aren't that pleased to see them, and so Farukh decides to travel further - finally taking Azamat along too. Shown in golden yellow-tinted monochrome, Khudojnazarov's debut feature (he was 26 at the time) is a picaresque rail-movie in which the underlying trauma is Azamat's habit of eating earth, the adventures are fleeting encounters with oddball friends and strangers, and the landscape is startlingly bleak. Funny and sad in equal parts, it stays just this side of cute. The glimpse of an open-air cinema where the projector breaks down acknowledges a debt to early Wenders.