Beautiful visuals, but jumbled, dreamlike story In Chasing the Birds, Farukh (Dzhanik Faiziyev), a young boy gets a brutal education in medieval Uzbekistan. The boy wakes the town shouting that the almond trees are in bloom, and gets a sound beating for rousing the towns folk from their sleep. Farukh is pursued by Amandyra (Dilorom Kambarova) a young woman who has a crush on him, and wants to elope with him, but when she is forced to marry after he does not come for her, she is unwilling to leave her wealthy new husband for him. Much of the film happens in open fields and streams, with Farukh's flashbacks to the village and his mother who died at his birth. This is all too jumbled to follow any chronology, or even know when the boy is dreaming, daydreaming or remembering an actual event. The boy also lost his father to drink, and then the town folk take all of Farukh's remaining possessions to satisfy his father's debts. After leaving the village with only the clothes on their backs and their ingenuity, Farukh and his childhood pal Khabib find a young orphaned girl Gultcha, who tags along with them until she and Khabib fall in love. When Farukh is away, a member of nobility who has taken a fancy to the girl, has his hunters invade their camp and then he rapes her. The Bey then kills Khabib in an underwater knife fight, before battling with Farukh. Lots of color and flashbacks & dreams make it hard to follow this non linear mystical story of lost loves and abuse by bandits or landlords. The acting is pastoral, even simplistic and the subtitles are hard to read against the light background; but the visuals are spectacular, so the 87 minutes are not a total loss.