A Flag

Bayraq

Lala Aliyeva
Azerbaijan, Georgia | 2025 | 39 min
World premiere
Language : Azerbaijani
Subtitles : English, French

In a small sewing atelier in Baku, Azerbaijan, the country’s most important symbol, the flag, is being crafted against the backdrop of the second Karabakh war in 2020. As customers enter, political agendas and propagandistic narratives infiltrate the workshop, blending with the stories of the seamstresses who are bringing the national emblem to life.

Sewing a flag may seem straightforward—but what are its precise format and proportions? What are the correct colours? Which side is up, which is down? These are the only, seemingly trivial, questions facing the seamstresses in a workshop in Sumqayit, Azerbaijan, in a country intoxicated by nationalist celebrations of victory in the second Nagorno-Karabakh war, where flags are in high demand. It is the men who place the orders, dictate how the flags should look, and lament the result when they don’t meet expectations. The women at the sewing machines, meanwhile, are left to navigate their doubts concerning their craft and what it stands for: are fabric and stitching, borders and enemies really enough to define a country and its people? Lala Aliyeva discovered the workshop by chance, but the symbolic and revelatory potential of this microcosm was evident, and it took her only a day and a half with the seamstresses to compose a spontaneous and disarming portrait of an entire country reflected in a few square metres, and a very lucid, caustic political chamber play about rampant nationalism in the shadow of this as well as many other flags. .

Sergio Fant

A Flag, 2025
In the Garden of Moons, 2023
With a Dash of Humor and Numbing Grief, 2021
They Whisper but Sometimes Scream, 2019
Jahan’s Universe, 2018
Out of my Window, 2017
Forbidden Friends, 2016