Running away from home isn’t always a childish teenager’s play: Khavaj knows it all too well. The young man from Chechnya plunges into the unknown out of the almost paralyzing fear for his own life, threatened in his native country by his assumed homosexuality, he gives up his home amidst his family because intolerance turned even those dear to him into judges and executioners. Here, in Belgium, the country he escapes to, the days go by slowly, drenched in the ever-present tension of the unseen danger, and the incapacity of expressing the pain through words is even more excruciating than the separation from his homeland. The voice of the mother emerges like a message from another unreal, magical time, an incantation wherein one can distinguish both the curse and the blessing. Between the attempt to cope with a menacing past and the new identity, arisen out of the most urgent necessity, goes on a silent war for survival. Khavaj is like a puzzle made of tormented silences, a body hidden in the shade, licking his wounds far from the hungry looks of those outside. (by Andreea Chiper)