Khaytarma (2013) on Netflix
Fighter pilot Amet-khan Sultan returns to his native Alupka on leave with his comrades Vovka and François. Before dawn on May 18, 1944, he sees Soviet troops begin deporting the Crimean Tatars.
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- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.2/10901 votes
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Plot summary
By May 1944, the fighting in Crimea is nearly over and Soviet troops are driving out the last Nazi units. Amet-khan Sultan, a fighter pilot and Guards Major twice named Hero of the Soviet Union, serves at an airfield outside Sevastopol. When the city is freed, he goes with his frontline comrades Vovka and François to his native Alupka on a three-day leave. There he reunites with his relatives, his mother and father among them. Shortly after four in the morning on May 18, 1944, he watches Soviet troops begin loading the Crimean Tatars of the town, his own family included, for deportation from their homeland.
Cast
- Usnie Khalilovaas Amethan's Mother
- Valerii Shitovalovas Father of Amet-khan
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Khaytarma (2013)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Vladimir Andreev, Russia's consul in Simferopol, called Haytarma a distortion of the truth that ignored alleged Crimean Tatar collaboration with Nazi Germany, told Russian generals invited to the premiere not to attend, and said the Crimean Tatars deserved to be deported.
- While filming a scene in which his character proposed to his beloved on horseback, director and star Akhtem Seitablaev was thrown by the animal and suffered a severe collarbone injury, his eleventh on a film set. The accident forced a big cut to the romance between Amet-Khan and Feride.
- Crimean Tatar actor Rasim Yunusov played an elderly water carrier closely mirroring his own grandfather, and in the deportation scene a man carries a sewing machine that was the very one his mother grabbed in 1944 and which saved the family from starvation in Uzbekistan.
- More than three thousand people from across Crimea took part in the crowd scenes of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, and roughly 700 of those extras had personally lived through the deportation themselves.
- The filmmakers first tried to raise money in Turkey, but Turkish representatives turned them down after reading the script. Russian businessman Lenur İslâm, owner of Ukrainian television station ATR Channel and the Queen Group, then stepped in to help the team.
- The night scene of people being loaded into train cars was shot on the 9th auxiliary track of the Bakhchysarai railway station, not far from Syuren station, where the actual events of May 1944 had taken place.
- At the Kazan International Festival of Muslim Cinema the film was pulled from the competition, despite earlier plans for it to open the festival, after a call from the Russian Foreign Ministry advising against screening it in competition.
- Haytarma was the first feature film to depict the history of the Crimean Tatar people, and it is dedicated to the memory of the grandfathers, great-grandfathers, fathers and mothers of that people.
