Baku, November 29, AZERTAC

“Mərmər soyuğu” (Cold as Marble), a movie by Azerbaijani filmmaker Asif Rustamov, will be presented in the competition program of the 18th Zagora International Trans-Saharan Film Festival to be held in Morocco on December 9-13.

The Zagora International Trans-Saharan Film Festival organizes 4 competitions, including Feature-length Fiction Film Competition, Documentary Film Competition and Short Fiction Film Competition.

Since its first edition in 2004, the Trans-Saharan International Film Festival of Zagora has been a prominent platform for promoting the natural, cultural, and historical environment offered by the Sahara Desert.

“Cold as Marble” is a co-production between Azerbaijan and France, through the companies Azerbaycanfilm, İTV, Baku Media Center and Arizona Films. The main producer of the film is Arzu Aliyeva, the screenwriters are Asif Rustamov and his Dutch colleague Roelof Jan Minneboo. Elshan Asgarov, Natavan Abbasli, and People's Artist Gurban Ismayilov co-starred in the movie.

The plot of the movie is about the man of the couple, played by Elshan Asgarov, who is actually a failed artist, potentially owing to his blindness in one eye, so he has to work as a gravestone engraver, specialising in portraits of the deceased. Another peculiar thing about him is his habit of avoiding the bedroom in his modest house, even when his married girlfriend (Natavan Abbasli) visits him. His routine changes one day when he finds an unexpected visitor who has broken into the house - his own father (Gurban Ismayilov, the winner of the Best Actor Award at the festival), who is supposed to be serving a prison sentence. The dad keeps berating the son, shouting homophobic slurs at him and trying to steer his life to bring it more into line with his own hustle schemes. However, unlike other people, the son knows his father’s dark secret and why he was imprisoned in the first place, and the girlfriend may have a scheme of her own that can be brought to fruition only with the help of a criminal. It seems that tragedy might repeat itself in yet another cycle...

The movie “Cold as Marble” had its world premiere in November 2022 at the PÖFF Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, where it was awarded in the category of "Best Actor" (Gurban Ismayilov). Besides, the movie awarded with "Best Director" (Asif Rustamov) at the 16th Eurasia International Film Festival in Almaty and main prize of the jury at the 29th International Festival of Asian Films (Festival International des Cinémas d'Asie) held in Vesoul, France.