Burning is in between fact and folklore, a Rashomon that meets psychological horror and it’s festival favorite. Enjoy.

In a village where grief hangs heavier than smoke, a house begins to burn — and no one can agree on why.

A young family has just buried their firstborn son. In the weeks that follow, the mother wanders from door to door, pleading for help no one understands, then vanishes into the trees at the forest’s edge. The father’s mother arrives, uninvited, unexplained. And then, one night, the house is consumed by fire.

What happened inside stays inside — except for what the neighbors think they saw. At the village shop, three witnesses trade fragments of the same night, and each fragment curdles into something darker than the last. A curse, some whisper. Others say it was grief itself, turned monstrous. Every retelling shifts the blame to a different member of the family, and every new detail makes the ones before it feel like lies. By the time the full picture assembles, the line between what happened and what the village needed to believe has dissolved entirely. And somewhere between fact and folklore, in the space no single witness can see, the real horror is waiting — patient, and closer than anyone thought.

Inspired by the fractured-truth storytelling of the Rashomon tradition, this is a psychological horror steeped not in jump scares but in dread: the terror of a story that changes every time it’s told, and a fire that never quite goes out.

The cast of the film includes: Aisant Edigeeva, Omurbek Izrailov, Kalicha Seydalieva, Zhanilai Isakova, Askar Kachkynbaev, Ruslan Orozakunov, and Meerim Kasabolotova. It is directed by Radik Ashimov and written by Aizada Amangeldy and Dastan Madalbekov.

The 2025 Gold Audience Award & special jury award winner at the Fantasia Film Festival premieres exclusively on Indiepix Unlimited, Burning, on September 4, 2026.