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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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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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 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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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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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 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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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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Films From Along the Silk Road: Central Asian Cinema

9/1/05 to 9/30/05

Between the Middle East and the western Chinese border lies a vast stretch of the continent that has barely registered on the Western cultural radar. This is the world where Genghis Khan ruled, and through which the great trade route called the Silk Road ran. The five former Soviet Asian republics are known to some as “the stans”-Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, linked by geographical proximity yet each possessed of its own unique culture. And its own distinctive national cinema.

Chances are you've never heard of most of the films in this series. You may wonder why. The reason is nothing more or less than an accident of history. When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did the apparatus for the promotion and distribution of films from Central Asia. Every time the films have surfaced, it's been the result of a titanic effort on the part of a few valiant scholars, programmers, and festival organizers. But the films are worth the effort. These countries are as culturally rich as they are cash poor, and the films, spanning eight decades and representing all five of the Central Asian republics plus Afghanistan, are rich in artistic and poetic miracles.

Kent Jones

Presented in conjunction with the Modes of Contemporary Central Asian Culture Program taking place on the UC Berkeley campus on September 24 and 25, organized by the Caucasus and Central Asia Program in the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at UC Berkeley; for information, please call (510) 643-6737.

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Films from Along the Silk Road is presented with support from the Christensen Fund and the Consortium for the Arts at UC Berkeley.
The series is curated by Alla Verlotsky and Kent Jones and presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Seagull Films with the generous support of the Open Society Institute. Except where otherwise indicated, program notes are adapted from Lincoln Center publications written by Kent Jones.