The name Samarkand, in the short form of a longer slow cinema piece, refers to my cine-portrait of the late Jacques Blamont (2020), in which the astrophysicist predicts the era of COVID-19 by alluding to ‘the meeting in Samarkand’, an age-old oriental tale of the inevitable meeting with death. Other than the shock of the betrayal and barefaced lying of our leaders worldwide – who, in the name of greed, through the wilful organization of chaos, forced us into effective house arrest on March 17 2020 and are now driving us back outside to face a said-to-be still present contagious virus – what affected me most is the loss of being carefree, a part of our lives lost forever.