by DAVID WALSH and JOANNE LAURIER
This is the fourth part of a series of articles on the recent FICUNAM film festival in Mexico City. The first part was posted March 18, the second partMarch 20, and the third part March 25.
One of the genuine contributions of the recent FICUNAM film festival in Mexico City was its presentation of the works of Uzbek-Soviet film director Ali Khamraev. For that, the organizers are to be congratulated. For some of us, this was a remarkable discovery. It’s a shame it had to take so long!
Khamraev was born in 1937—at the height of Stalin’s terror—in Tashkent, in what was then the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, in Central Asia. He attended the famed VGIK film school in Moscow, graduating in 1961. He began working for Uzbekfilm, the film studio founded in Tashkent in 1925, that same year. In 1964, he made a comic film Yor-yor, which became quite popular. The first of the films shown this year in Mexico City, White, White Storks, was released in 1966.
A recurring theme in Khamraev’s Soviet-era films was the struggle against social and cultural backwardness in the impoverished Central Asian region. The problem of the oppressed “woman of the East,” i.e., the veiled Muslim woman, preoccupied him in particular.
In addition to White, White Storks, the FICUNAM festival screened Without Fear (1972), The Seventh Bullet (1972), Man Follows Birds (1975), The Bodyguard (1979), Triptych (1979), I Remember You (1985) and Bo, Ba, Bu(1998). (A number of these films are accessible on YouTube with English subtitles.)
The greatest strength of Khamraev as a filmmaker is his willingness to tackle life directly and with great sincerity, at a consistently high and serious artistic level. This is not someone who shies away from things or hides his essential timidity and inability to face up to the most difficult problems with chilly objectivity. In the best traditions of Russian fiction and film, Khamraev plunges courageously into reality, even if he sometimes makes mistakes.
This is the artistic and intellectual tradition that the great 19th century Russian critic Belinsky wrote of, which evinced “a noble sympathy with everything that is lofty and sublime, [and] deals with the most vital problems of life, destroys the old inveterate prejudices and raises its voice in indignation against the deplorable aspects of contemporary morals and manners.”
“The most vital problems of life.” How many contemporary filmmakers can claim, or would even want to claim, to be dealing with those?
Of course, that a young man in Tashkent would take on life through filmmaking was only made possible by the October Revolution and the existence of the Soviet Union. A small percentage of the Uzbek was literate before 1917; that percentage then rose to 100 percent. The Uzbek SSR was founded in 1924, one year before Uzbekfilm.
The policies of the anti-Marxist Stalinist bureaucracy brought about the degeneration and, eventually, the destruction of the USSR. In Uzbekistan, for those in power, the seamless transition from Stalinist clique to imperialist agency took a particularly clear-cut and even personal form.
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