Films From Along the Silk Road: Central Asian Cinema

9/1/05 to 9/30/05

  • Revenge, September 15

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  • The Fierce One

    Thursday, September 1 19:30
    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
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  • The Last Stop (Free Screening!)

    Thursday, September 1 17:30
    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
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  • Without Fear

    Friday, September 2 19:30
    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
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  • The Daughter-in-Law

    Friday, September 2 21:25
    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
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  • The White Ship

    Thursday, September 8 21:15
    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
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  • Man Follows Birds

    Thursday, September 8 19:30
    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
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  • The Fall of Otrar

    Friday, September 9 19:30
    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
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  • Revenge

    Thursday, September 15 19:30
    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
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  • Tenderness

    Friday, September 16 21:20
    Greatly influenced by Italian cinema and the French New Wave, Elyer Ishmukhamedov's 1967 film tells three intertwined stories of young love in Tashkent.
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  • Takhir and Zukhra

    Friday, September 16 19:30
    "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.
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  • Angel on the Right

    Friday, September 23 19:00
    In Jamshed Usmonov's dark Tajik comedy, "ancient traditions butt up against the lawless world of the new capitalism."-Film Comment
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  • Osama

    Friday, September 23 20:50
    A young woman disguises herself as a boy in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. "Truth shines through every frame."-Time
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  • The Roof of the World

    Friday, September 23 17:00
    Joel Adlen on Piano. Introduced by Davlat Khudonazarov. Feats of mountaineering and priceless ethnographic details in a 1928 documentary from Tadjikistan.
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  • The First Teacher

    Friday, September 30 21:10
    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
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  • The Adopted Son

    Friday, September 30 19:30
    "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
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