Vom Lokführer, der die Liebe suchte... (2018)

The train driver Nurlan regularly travels through a suburb of Baku with his freight train. The tracks run so close between the houses that they are part of the residents’ everyday lives: children play there, adults play board games, and laundry hangs across the tracks. When the track signal turns green, the little orphan boy Aziz runs ahead of the train with a whistle to warn the residents. It doesn’t always work; sometimes a chicken, a ball, or a piece of laundry can’t be moved to safety in time. One day, a bra gets caught on the train’s window. The lonely Nurlan, now retired, decides to search for its owner. His attempt to woo a bride in a mountain village had not gone well. Despite bringing many gifts, he could not meet the bride’s mother’s expectations. She placed a pair of dumbbells in front of him, and he couldn’t lift them. Nurlan knocks on the doors of the houses along the railway, holding up the bra. It is a difficult undertaking: not all the women want to try it on, though some do; some are interested in Nurlan and insist, against all reality, that the bra fits. Naturally, whenever the husbands are home, he provokes their violent displeasure. After facing many rejections, Nurlan turns to selling bras as a traveling peddler in order to get close to the women. The orphan boy Aziz, who lives in a doghouse and serves tea in a teahouse, helps him, especially when Nurlan comes up with the idea of hijacking a mobile X-ray unit for mammography. Nurlan has no success. But now the men of the neighborhood chase him, beat him up, and chain him to the tracks. The orphan boy Aziz, who runs ahead of the train, manages to save him at the last minute. Now Nurlan has found love. He takes Aziz, the orphan boy who has just been driven away by the hard-hearted teahouse owner, with him to his mountain village. On the way, they find the bottom half of the bra on a clothesline. It belongs to the signal-box operator. They attach the top half to it and continue on their way home.