Back to selection
Asia Society Announces First Dedicated NYC Retrospective of Uzbek Legend Ali Khamraev
The Seventh Bullet “If there is a giant who sits astride the history of Uzbek cinema, it’s Ali Khamraev, one of those rare talents like Welles or Godard or Scorsese whose love for the medium is so intense that his best films burst with criss-crossing energies and insights, like a fireworks display.” –Kent Jones
Ali Khamraev (b. 1937, Tashkent) is one of the great living filmmakers whose work has been too-little-seen in the western world. Throughout his career Khamraev has exhibited extraordinary artistic range, transitioning from realist social dramas to the “Ostern” (“Eastern”) genre of films— which transpose American Western tropes onto the regional history, landscapes and politics of the Eastern Bloc— and settling into a deeply poetic, personal style reminiscent in various ways of his friends and colleagues Sergei Parajanov and Andrei Tarkovsky.
The five films presented in Khamraev’s first dedicated New York retrospective exemplify that trajectory and speak to the depth of artistry achieved in each phase of the filmmaker’s oeuvre. With keen attention to the Uzbek/Soviet culture clash following the Russian revolution (in particular, the conflict between atheistic and Islamic value systems) and a deep, creative symbiosis with his native landscape, Khamraev’s work makes a strong case for the place of Central Asian cinema in the 20th century canon.
This fall, Anthology Film Archives joins forces with Asia Society to celebrate the work of Khamraev. Thanks to Asia Society’s initiative, Khamraev will be traveling to the U.S., for the series “Eastern Notions: Films by Ali Khamraev,” the first NYC program fully dedicated to his work. Anthology will host the opening night of the series, with a screening of Khamraev’s beloved 1971 feature Without Fear, which captures a symbolic clash between Soviet and Islamic cultures, focusing on a 14-year-old girl who decides to be the first in her village to drop the veil and chador after urging by a visiting commissar.
Following this opening night event, the series will move uptown to Asia Society, which will present screenings from Friday, November 21 through Sunday, November 23 of Khamraev’s more rarely-screened works, White, White Storks (1966), The Seventh Bullet (1973), Man Follows Birds (1976), and I Remember You (1985), featuring Q&As with Khamraev and actress Gulcha Tashbayeva.
