The Chechen Family

Abubakar is 46 years old and participates in the Zikr, ritual dances performed by Chechen Sufi Muslims. At each Zikr he reaches a state of ecstasy and for Abubakar it’s an exorcism, a form of liberation from everything that his people have suffered over so many years of occupation. The presence of his mother, his wife and his nine children make ghosts from the past and present reappear: stories of the 1948 deportation, his daughters under threat from kidnappings, the city of Grozny in the present day, lights, sounds, landscapes, dark faces behind dilapidated walls. All of this brings memory to life mixing it with reality. It is the everyday reunion that a Chechen makes with two pillars of his society, faith and culture, embodied in the Zikr where the sacred merges with the profane.