Script File
Waiting for A Cab
Waiting for a Cab is a hybrid theatre/film absurd tragicomedy about a young jaded writer who waits for a cab under the pouring rain and makes odd acquaintances in the night.
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Əhmədov BehzadWriter"The Sleepwalkers" (2014), “Documentarian” (2015), “To Find a Woman” (2016) and “Harami” (2018)
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Gabriel GalandDirectorHorla (France - 2015), Above the Mist (South Korea - 2016), Resilience (Swizerland - 2017) - I'm Sorry (Canada - 2018)
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Laura KatzDesignerHorla (France - 2015), Above the Mist (South Korea - 2016), Resilience (Swizerland - 2017) - I'm Sorry (Canada - 2018)
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Project Type:Student, Screenplay, Short Script
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Genres:Drama, Comedy, Absurd, Romance
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Number of Pages:10
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Country of Origin:Azerbaijan
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Language:English
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First-time Screenwriter:No
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Student Project:Yes
Behzad Ahmadov was born in Baku Azerbaijan in 1988. He studied science at Baku State University. Later, he attended the International Film and Television School of Paris (EICAR), where he made his thesis project “The Sleepwalkers”. After graduating, Behzad returned to his hometown where he has been working ever since as a freelancer screenwriter. He has written three feature film scripts, including “Documentarian” (2015), “To Find a Woman” (2016) and “Harami” (2018.) Also, he is a member of Azerbaijani state Film Studio with which he made a documentary about the Karabakh war hero Rohshan Huseynov.
Once, when I was a film student in Paris, I stayed up late one night in Montmartre. I left them near the metro station Abesses and called a taxi and sat on a bench nearby and naively start to wait. While waiting, I started to observe people and things around me. Cars passing by, people walking and laughing. Then things started to get a little bit surreal. I had a feeling that everything was staged. As if it has some meaning or order, as if there was an exact written plan, as if everything was orchestrated.
I saw an old man who unsuccessfully tried to communicate with me because of the language barrier, and a girl who just ran out inside a car down the road. For a second, I had a feeling that my whole life was passing by. Sitting on the bench facing the road, I could witness something that I had never witnessed in my life previously: Nostalgia. There wasn’t any sadness or grief. It was a pure feeling of Nostalgia about life. I felt very human in that moment. This moment of authenticity was so strong that I didn't notice that I had been waiting for the taxi for almost 2 hours. The moment of self-detachment was so vivid and in some sense so beautiful that I lost track of time. That Heideggerian moment is very important for us to realize who we are. It is necessary to leave the picture to experience it fully. This feeling of Nostalgia is very present through the whole film. While the Old man longs for old days, Elizabeth longs for a better life and finally Samuel longs for life itself. They all are waiting for something. The taxi is just a metaphor for something, which differs between the characters.
The struggle with these characters or the specifics of their situation is that, they try to understand their situation while they are living in that situation. The only way to fully understand, to grasp it, is to wait for it to end. That’s why Samuel only gets enlightened when deaths arrives in the form of a taxi. The pure tragedy of it is that he has no idea what he understood. He just felt it. Waiting For a Cab downsizes life to its core meaning, to its very essence, its kernel. It comes to the edge of life and fiction, to the border where there will always be people like Samuel who will suffer because of Nostalgia for life itself.