UK premieres
Wheelchair accessible | English subtitles | Pay-what-you-can tickets (£2–12)
If the ticket or other costs, such as childcare or transport, make this screening unaffordable, please see details of our Audience Access Fund.
Following last year’s Audience Award for Alex Milic’s Consul of Nowhereland (Montenegro), this year’s competition brings 14 new titles — from Poland and Iran to Uzbekistan and Greece. Once again, you — our audience! — will vote for the winner.
Opening with an archival work that exposes the colonial mechanisms and Oriental optics of Soviet filmmaking in Central Asia, our second block moves through the striking, poetic landscapes of Qazaqstan and Georgia, before arriving at a pink bathroom in Ukraine, a surrealist shrimp farm. Diminishing and Orientalising voices and looks from the 1920s–1930s Soviet archive reappear only to be deconstructed in a reflective video essay. Slapstick absurdism from Iran offers a moment of comic relief before a deep over-the-shoulder dive into the lives of children of labour migrants, forced to grow up too quickly.
Content notes: colonialism, extractivism, state oppression, trauma and grief, death and discussion of death, animal cruelty
Access notes: black and white footage, archival footage of varying quality, flashing and flickering lights, loud music
Selected by Natalia Guzevataya, misha irek and Dylan Beck
Programme (In Order of Screening)
Whose Voice Is This? by Dana Iskakova, Qazaqstan*/Uzbekistan/Germany, 2024
Aldi by Giorgi Arabuli, Georgia, 2024
The Experiment by Maxim Akbarov, Qazaqstan*, 2024
Shrimp, Switch, Cigarette Butt and a Little Bottle by Olha Pyrozhyk, Ukraine, 2025
Shreds of Violence, Threads of Repair by Assiya Issemberdieva, Qazaqstan*/UK
Mr. Meftah by Soheil Darvishparvar, Iran, 2024
Mirtemir Is Alright by Sasha Kulak & Michael Borodin, Uzbekistan, 2024
* In 2023, a Latin-based alphabet gained co-official status with the Soviet-era Cyrillic script in Qazastan. Full transition to the new script is expected by 2031. The switch is part of the slow process of decolonisation and is aimed to right the wrong of Soviet cultural policy that subjected the people of Qazaqstan (and other colonised groups) to multiple forced changes of script, first from the Central Asian variety of the Arabic script to Latin, then from Latin to modified Cyrillic – all in under 15 years.
The official spelling of the country’s name in the new Latin script is Qazaqstan. This spelling more accurately reflects the phonology of the Qazaq language. By contrast, the Soviet-defined standard spelling of “Kazakhstan” is based on Russian phonetics and Soviet cultural policy. Initially, the Soviet state mislabelled Qazaqstan as “Kirghizstan” (the Kyrgyz people whose lands were initially included in Soviet Kirghiztan, were termed “Kara-Kirghiz”), because the pronunciation of the word “Qazaq” was considered too similar to “Cossac” when spoken in Russian. Popular opposition in Central Asia forced the USSR to end the linguistic erasure and conflation of Qazaq and Kyrgyz identities. But Soviet nomenclature deliberately replaced the second “q” in Qazaq with the softer Russian “kh” [«х»] in order to amplify the phonetic difference between the words “Kazakh” and “Cossac” when spoken in Russian.