UK/Scottish premieres, White Mountains premiering an original English translation
With a recorded introduction by writer and researcher Oleksii Kuchanskyi

Wheelchair accessible | English and descriptive subtitles | £9 (concession) / £11.90 (full price)

If the ticket or other costs, such as childcare or transport, make this screening unaffordable, please see details of our Audience Access Fund.

Set in 1918, two years after the Central Asian ‘Urkun’ anticolonial revolts, White Mountains tells the story of an exiled teenager Mukash on the run from Tsarist soldiers and local warlords. Traversing the treacherous Kyrgyz mountains, Mukash witnesses the devastation left behind by the warring factions of Bolsheviks and Tsarists and attempts to save a young woman forcefully sold into marriage to a village elder. The graduate film by the legendary director Melis Ubukeyev, this Kyrgyz quasi-Western boasts incredible point-of-view cinematography and a melancholic soundtrack featuring national folk songs.

Further fleshing out and adding a different context to the anticolonial message of White Mountains, Where Russia Ends is a new found footage short film by Ukrainian filmmaker Olexiy Radynskiy. In the late 1980s, Ukrainian filmmakers from Kyiv’s Science Film Studio conducted expeditions to Siberia, documenting Indigenous communities. Their footage, marked by the complex interplay of colonial power dynamics underlying Soviet cinematic narratives, has resurfaced in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Where Russia Ends is a rediscovery, reimagination, a poignant anticolonial essay, reconstructing the mechanics of russian imperialism, cultural erasure and environmental destruction. Factual and precise in the face of the ongoing atrocities.

Content notes: child abuse, death, grief, animal cruelty

Curated by Ilia Ryzhenko and Natalia Guzevataya

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