Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov – Bratan AKA Brother (1991)
Synopsis wrote:
Farukh, (17) wants to go away. He takes a train with his little brother Azamat (7) to visit their father. Farukh intends to leave Azamat at his father’s before leaving. This is the story of their journey.
Restoration notes wrote:
About the restoration
In 2017, Khudojnazarov’s friend and colleague, German filmmaker Veit Helmer, started to investigate
the whereabouts of the early films. Most had been made with co-producers from Europe and their
materials stored in laboratories in France and Germany.
But the whereabouts of the picture and sound negatives of Khudojnazarov’s debut “Bratan” proved to
be a mystery. There were several 35mm prints, subtitled in various languages, but the distribution
companies who owned the rights no longer existed, and all distribution rights had expired. The original
negative could not be found in the film archive in Tajikistan, nor in the state film archive in Moscow.
The former sales agent of the film, Christa Saredi, gave Veit Helmer a clue. Bratan had been produced
by Tajik Film Studio in Dushanbe, on behalf of Soviet Television, as part of EKRAN, a program to support
filmmakers in the Soviet republics of Central Asia. But by the time the film was completed, the Soviet
Union had collapsed.
Veit Helmer managed to locate the negative at the State television archive in Moscow.
The archive scanned the negative on a resolution of 2.150 x 1582 pixels, 10 bit and delivered DPX-files
via upload to Cinegrell in Berlin, who made the restoration.
The most complicated part of the restoration was to determine the color tint.
Colorist Mario Hartz made five more versions over the course of a year, with different intensities of
sepia.These were shown to Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov’s close collaborators and relatives, before settling
on a very subtle sepia tint.
The restoration was completed in July 2022.
Bratan.AKA.The.Little.Brother.1991.576p.BluRay.AAC2.0.x264-SoLaR.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1 h 37 min
Size: 2.80 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 792x576
Aspect ratio: 1.375
Frame rate: 24.000 fps
Bit rate: 3 924 kb/s
BPP: 0.358
Audio
#1: Russian 2.0ch AAC LC @ 175 kb/s (Stereo)
Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Italian