Synopsis:

In the distance a woman crosses the landscape on her camel. A woman’s voice (is it her voice?) tells us how the kurai can still surprise her. The kurai may look lifeless but is actually virile like a young man - leaving his seed everywhere during his journey across the plain and bringing messages from far away. The kurai always keeps his ear to the ground. Everywhere he goes, he takes something away and leaves something behind. The tales of the kurai, the tales of the wind, carries many secrets.

Emo (27) was born in the land of the kurai, although he doesn’t remember much about it. His only memory is perhaps the one summer’s morning he ran into a landscape of snow, which turned out to be a rock-hard salt plain. From that moment on, he mistrusted the world. A couple of years later his mother sent him to the city to have a better life. Emo never understood what she meant by saying she sent him away because he was her most important treasure.

Emo is older now, he has studied, and has been in love. In the city he learnt a different way of life. With nobody to remind him, he forgot about his roots. But his mistrust remained. Now the woman he loves is standing in front of him. Pregnant. By him? Vera will not answer. She says their love is the only thing that matters. Emo is overtaken by his mistrust and leaves, even though he has no place to go. From the train Emo watches the kurai as it travels with him. How it speeds up, slows down, turns into an unexpected direction. It rolls wherever the wind blows: seductive, but uncertain. Emo holds on to the iron route of the train.

The kurai leaves Emo and goes it’s own way, like always. It brings us to Gulsari, who fails to shoot a fox because he feels there’s more going on in the world than meets the eye. And to Sufjani, the old woman on her camel, who has been looking for the dead body of her son for eighteen years now. To Juzin, who tells an old myth about the secret of the kurai. ‘Where does he come from, where is he going to?’ Nobody knows the answer. And then it takes us back to Emo. He has left the train and is now travelling through the plain like a drifting kurai still not knowing what he is looking for.

We roll on further through the landscape with the kurai, with and without Emo, past new characters and old familiar ones, past surprising philosophies of life, through intriguing stories. Like the kurai we take something with us from these meetings and we leave something behind. Increasingly, Emo lets himself be led by what he sees or hears, unexpected events, his journey intersecting with other people’s paths. He breaks loose from everything that he was always sure he knew. But only when he visits the grave of his mother, he finds peace. And finally he understands the secret of the kurai. ‘Fortunate is he who goes with the wind, rests when the wind subsides and leaves again to go where the wind blows.’