Saodat Ismailova

A documentary film about the three remaining generations of fishermen in the Aral Sea-- Their everyday struggle to survive in one of the most dire and inhospitable places on the planet.

After a devastating earthquake, Nga, an old elephant and probably the last of its species, and Sanra, his mahout, are about to embark on a journey to find the mythical elephant’s graveyard. The group of poachers following them will die one after the other under mysterious circumstances and spells.

According to the 12th century mystic Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi, the world we live in is only one of the 18,000 that make up the universe. The film 18,000 WORLDS is conceived as a video story that draws attention to a world that is losing contact with its ancestors, and where the danger of losing forms of knowledge is real.

This is a passage between two faces, each the same, yet different. Bibicha’s face first appears in the dark, her eyes open and expression impassive, only her heavy breathing betraying the strain she feels. She will withstand the strain and take the vow of silence, retreating to her grandmother’s house for the 40 days to pass. The house and the landscape outside at least offer Bibicha certain sensory distractions: the taste of honey, the texture of a wall, an eye-catching bedspread, the view out over a sea of cloud, water fizzling on the stove. But it is not just her under strain, as her aunt’s frantic text messaging, her grandmother’s rueful acknowledgement of the stories of marital strife on the radio and her little cousin’s illegitimate status bear witness to. Four generations of women in the complete absence of men, yet all marked by their presence, the similarity of their fates blurring together different times and customs.

Two Horizons is a two-screen video that speculates between ancient Turkic legend and soviet space travel program. The First Shaman of the Great Eurasian Steppe – Qorqut tried to escape Death throughout his life. It appeared to him as a seven years old boy. The only way for Qorqut to escape Death and achieve immortality was to levitate, hence beating gravity. It occurred in the southern edge of the Great Steppe. Locals venerate this place, as they believe that Qorqut revealed umbilical navel of the Earth. Later in the middle of the XX century this same place became known to the world as Baikonur, Soviet Union’s Space Station. Where the First Human defied gravity in mission Vostok - 1, traveling to space in the search of eternal life.

The work is inspired by the ambiguous figure of Al-Muqannaʿ (“The Veiled One”), a dyer who became a spiritual and political agitator in eighth-century southern Central Asia, while it speculates about the cultural and political echoes of his revolutionary ideas. Al-Muqannaʿ preached an ideological syncretism of Zoroastrianism, Mazdakism and Buddhism, and awakened the minds of his “White-Clothed” disciples by shedding light on the status quo of his time, challenging practices of land exploitation, authoritarian centralized power, and religious repression. His legacy, which might be seen today as “proto socialist,” was appropriated by the regional Soviet propaganda machine as a nativist heroic example of how to rise up and fight for the communal sharing of property and wealth.

Composed of footage from Central Asian film archives, Swan Lake addresses the period running from a decade before to a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The film includes familiar visual markers of the era: long queues outside shops, popular television programs hosted by healers and hypnotists, ballerinas performing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (1876). This was a typical television intermezzo in the late Soviet empire, when high culture often filled the airwaves during moments of political uncertainty, whether the death of another elderly leader or an emergency declared in Moscow. What may be less familiar to Western audiences is the footage drawn from Central Asian films of the same period. These fragments extend the usual visual aesthetics of perestroika into a different regional context, introducing other ethnicities, landscapes, and urban spaces into what is often remembered as a predominantly Russian narrative of late-Soviet culture.

Bibi Seshanbe Ona – literally ‘The Lady of Tuesday’ – is a widespread blessing ritual in Central Asia. It incorporates elements of animalism, Zoroastrianism and an ancient story comparable to Cinderella. It is performed in a small circle of women and includes cooking special traditional foods, lighting candles and fortune-telling using flour. It is still performed in Uzbekistan and Tadjikistan.

Her Right is based on original feature films filmed in Uzbekistan from the 1920s to the 1980s and focuses on hujum, a government campaign against the wearing of the burqa in order to emancipate Muslim women.

Saodat Ismailova looks back at the history of female heroines over nearly a century of Uzbek cinema in order to chart the changing perception of women and the state of the film industry more widely. Commissioned as part of Asian Film Archive’s Monographs, a series of essays on Asian cinema.

A young woman lies on her deathbed or in a lethargic sleep. It is filled with memories, sensations that can be associated with the destinies of Uzbek women of the 20th century.

This symbolic and suggestive film is a cinematic letter to an extinct race of tigers, and uses an almost hallucinatory force to conjure up a mythological, Central Asian world of yesterday. The majestic animal speaks to us about the historical changes that led up to its own extinction, but it lives on in the collective imagination of Turkestan as a sacred image of the soul.

Two buses cross the horizon driving towards Chillpiq. A group of girls climb the ruins that stand on a mount in the middle of the steppe. They arrived to worship a flagpole that crowns the archeological site, one after the other they bind a cloth on it, as if it would be a tree of life. 40 girls circle around the shrine while the sunset is changing the light to dramatic orange, and blur the girls, making them visually dissolving into the site.

Stains of Oxus evokes an oneiric journey through the greatest Central Asian river, Amu Dariya – known in Greek times as Oxus, portraying the transformation of landscape and witnessing people that inhabit its riverbanks, beginning from the high plateau of Tajikistan to the lowland desserts in Uzbekistan where the river finds its end. Uzbekistan where the river finds its longest journey is one of the two land locked countries in the world, making water a sacred element of nature. Stains of Oxus attempts to bring back a memory of how water has been worshiped and taken care in the tradition. This abstract topographic journey awakes the question of Central Asian ecosystem and landscape, traditions of caring about water and brings up the problem of water mismanagement in the region in a poetic way.

A film by Saodat Ismailova