For Ukrainian Mila Zhluktenko and partner Daniel Asadi Faezi, both based in Munich, the commission by Tashkent International Film Festival to shoot a short film in Uzbekistan presented a series of creative opportunities.
One of twenty filmmaking teams invited to participate, Zhluktenko and Faedi were invited to film in the region of Karakalpakistan. It is a place in great part defined by the Aral Desert, formerly the fourth largest inland sea in the world, which has gradually disappeared since the 1960s when the waters that fed it were diverted to assist in mass agricultural irrigation in the USSR.
As the film shows, this has had catastrophic effects on the environment and the socio-economic infrastructure. There is no longer a fishing industry (we see in old footage how vibrant that once was), the birds have migrated (and have not returned) and “eventually the foxes vanished too,” the film tells us. The only plant that grows in the desert is the sauxal, whose extensive root system extracts whatever water it can from the terrain. The desert also contains the abandoned husks of old fishing boats, repurposed now as canvasses for lovers’ graffiti.
But the film also has an intense lyricism both visually and within its audio discourse, as we sense the sound of water while watching the sun set on (or rise from) the sand. The filmmakers also distill the whole ecological dilemma of the region by simply reversing the motion of the sea’s decades-old waves, as seen in archive. “And the sound is disappearing in the nothingness,” says co-director Zhluktenko. The film attempts to, at least cinematically, reverse the desertification of the Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Zhluktenko further explains the initial appeal of shooting a film within this part of Caucuses. “Daniel has already made a series of films about landscapes and lakes and how [change] interferes with identity and loss of identity. And for the other part, I knew that Taras Shevchenko, the famous Ukrainian painter and poet was an exile in the region…and was on the first expedition to the Aral Sea that was made by the Russian empire to make technical drawings. So we immediately had these connections in our heads.” The film indeed opens with a still of a beautiful 19th century painting of the Aral shore by Shevchenko.
Zhluktenko was more active on the direction side, she says, given that she speaks Russian and therefore could deal better with the Uzbek crew. “We [she and Daniel] would sit down and work out together what the concept is. And then I was transmitting it to the people and trying to give them our vision.”
“We edited the first draft together and then he got more into it. So I did the research on some texts and pictures and then Daniel was editing, putting the found footage into the film and sending it to me. And then I gave him some thoughts and then he worked by himself…It’s organically happening that we divide the duties.”
“We are both classically-trained directors but we started collaborating,” explains Faezi. “Mila was editing my last film that was in VdR in 2018 [The Absence of Apricots]. I was producing her short film afterwards. Now this [Aralkum] is the first co-directing work. (Zhluktenko’s Find Fix Finish was previously selected for Visions du Réel in 2017.)
Aralkum is fourteen minutes in duration. Was this a help or a hindrance in creating a work that is as lyrical as it is complex and moving? “We really believe in the short as an independent art form. For us, it’s not a proof of concept for a feature length… which is why [it is] so joyful to work with,” responds Faezi.
“It always makes the process so interesting when you have to focus and to limit yourself,” adds Zhluktenko. “And it helps a lot to make a vision of how the film should be and what it should be about. And to use the form to tell this story, because you cannot tell everything.”
Which means that the filmmakers won’t be returning to the subject of the Aral Sea/Desert for a feature.
That said, the pair are currently preparing a new project which will comprise a short, a feature and an installation, titled Lagerkontinuität, about military barracks in Germany that were originally built by the Wehrmacht, taken over by the US army after WW2 and now re-purposed as a refugee centre.
“For the short film [to be shot in June 2022 on 16mm] we will choose, again, a very small idea, more conceptual. And then for the feature length, we have tableaus, little stories from around that building,” says Faezi. The filmmakers have received funding for the short and are currently seeking funding for the installation and feature.
Right now, however, there are more pressing concerns as the pair are raising monies to buy equipment for delivery to Kyiv-based Ukrainian docmakers within the #Babylon’13 collective who are chronicling the conflict. So far Zhluktenko and Faezi have collected €36,000 and have managed to get much vital equipment over the border. “They say what they want and what they need. And we buy it and send it,” says Zhluktenko.
“It’s forensic cinema,” says Faezi, before going on to explain how he and Zhluktenko are also helping #Babylon’13 on the post-production of its upcoming Iron Butterflies, directed by Roman Liubyi. The film reflects on the shooting down over Ukrainian airspace of Malaysian Airlines Boeing flight MH17, with 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board by pro-Russian separatists. “Through this new visualisation the audience will get a chance to see the event from different angles and at different times, simultaneously connecting the crimes of the past with the present,” write the
