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.

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

Curated by Ilia Ryzhenko