“In Between Dying” is a dreamlike story of personal transformation from rising Azerbaijani director Hilal Baydarov.  With a fast-growing body of work that blends fiction and documentary, Baydarov is singlehandedly raising the profile of Azerbaijan at film festivals.  “In Between Dying” is the story of one epochal day in the life of Davud (Orkhan Iskandarli), a young man who constantly dreams of finding his ‘real’ family, a hypothetical wife and child who will understand him and bring him a sense of fullness.  His constant aspiration to an idealized existence makes him alienated from his own life, in which he grouchily shares a small house with his mother. 

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Davud’s fateful day starts, appropriately, in a cemetery overlooking Baku.  Davud kills a man after hearing an insult, mere feet away from an underworld leader, and flees, inaugurating a day of strange, symbolic encounters in which Death is never far behind him.  While the exact details of each episode differ, each shares a pattern of an abused or forgotten woman seeking a form of liberation from male violence or neglect, from a rabid woman who has been chained and beaten by her father to a woman fleeing the alter of an arranged marriage.

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