Andrei Konchalovsky's first feature, set in a Kirghiz village shortly after the Revolution. "The conflict . . . between Asia and Europe, the beauty of tradition and the need for change . . . expressed with a deft simplicity of style and a rare quality of emotion."-Michel Ciment
"Taking the patterns of handmade Kirghiz rugs as both his narrative rhythm and visual template . . . [Aktan] Abdikalikov examines village life through the eyes of a 13-year-old boy. . . . Remarkable for its slyly resonant imagery."-Village Voice
In Jamshed Usmonov's dark Tajik comedy, "ancient traditions butt up against the lawless world of the new capitalism."-Film Comment
A young woman disguises herself as a boy in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. "Truth shines through every frame."-Time
Joel Adlen on Piano. Introduced by Davlat Khudonazarov. Feats of mountaineering and priceless ethnographic details in a 1928 documentary from Tadjikistan.
"The Uzbek film tradition is [Central Asia's] oldest, and Takhir and Zukhra (1945)-a Romeo and Juliet variation, based on a regional folktale-is the series' ancestral touchstone."-Village Voice. Photographed by Daniil Demutsky, cinematographer of Dovzhenko's Arsenal and Earth.
Greatly influenced by Italian cinema and the French New Wave, Elyer Ishmukhamedov's 1967 film tells three intertwined stories of young love in Tashkent.
Kazakhstan's "Ermek Shinarbaev, who has to be one of the great storytellers in movies, takes the finest psychological threads and traces them down to their frayed ends. . . . [In] the altogether astonishing Revenge . . . the urge to wreak vengeance for the murder of a child is followed across two generations and three countries."-Film Comment
Ardak Amirkulov's epic, "a pageant of medieval delirium in which the great Khan extinguishes an entire civilization the way a CEO would downsize a corporation, is shot through with the strangest kind of melancholy, brought on by the knowledge that an entire way of life is going to disappear."-Film Comment
Ali Khamraev's Uzbek tour de force has been called an Eastern Western, and "a Paradjanovian medieval pageant of boyhood under primal pressure."-Village Voice
A boy's way of life, tied to the earth and centuries-old myths, is threatened by the New Soviet Way in this Kirghiz film combining ethnographic fantasia and embittered social realism, based on a Chinghiz Aitmatov story. "A treat for the eyes and the spirit."-N.Y. Times
From Turkmenistan, Khodjakuli Narliev's "fascinating artifact of Soviet style and Muslim propriety, as the shy wife of a WWII pilot counts out her days in the desert with her kindly father-in-law, waiting for a return that may never come."-Village Voice
The women of an Uzbek village provoke a conflict between Islamic and Communist values. "Fuses history, melodrama, and political allegory into a compact narrative. . . . [Ali] Khamraev dramatizes a complex cultural shift with subtlety and vigor."-N.Y. Sun
A young soldier in the Soviet army returns to his dead-end village in Serik Aprimov's evocative film, "a landmark in the valiant heyday of the Kazakh New Wave."-Film Comment
In the Kirghiz mountains, a boy rescues a wolf cub. "This tough-minded coming-of-age story from Tolomush Okeev . . . snarls with emotion."-N.Y. Sun