The Caucasus Film Festival runs through March 31 in Tbilisi. (Poster courtesy: Caucasus Film Festival.)
A week-long Caucasus Cinema Festival is underway in Tbilisi. In a region marked by discord during the post-Soviet era, the festival strives to promote peace-building by highlighting cultural commonalities.
The driving force behind the festival is Claire Delessard, who serves as a Regional Conflicts Adviser for the Northern and Southern Caucasus attached to the British Embassy in Tbilisi. The EU is helping to fund the film series.
“Caucasian people had always been living together without division lines for centuries,” Delessard said in an email interview. “We thus wanted for people to remember these times through cinema.”
The festival kicked off on March 26 with a screening of one of the most famous films made during the Soviet era, Sergey Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (Sayat Nova). Made in 1968, the film is a dream-like fantasy that recounts the life and death of an 18th century Armenian bard. (A drastic departure from the state-approved style of Soviet realism, the film helped earn Parajanov four years of prison camps in the1970s.)
Another Parajanov classic, The Shadow of Forgotten Ancestors, a story of family rivalries set in a Ukrainian Hutsul village, will also be screened during the festival.
“This film is not only an historical lesson for us, but also a cinema masterpiece,” Delessard said.
Other films in the lineup include Highlander, a 1992 film directed by the Ossetian director Murat Djusoev that depicts life in the mountains of the Caucasus. The oldest film being screened is a Georgian silent picture from 1929, My Grandmother, directed by Kote Miqaberidze, while the most recently released film is 2010’s Precinct (Sahə), an Azerbaijani drama involving romance and career choices.
Central Asia fans have waited several years for the release of a documentary about Igor Savitsky, whom the New York Times calls “an obsessive collector credited with saving tens of thousands of avant-garde artworks from Soviet authorities who forced artists toward Socialist Realism in the 1930s," by housing his collection out of Moscow’s sight in the Uzbek desert. His successors – he died in 1984 – have maintained his museum with some private support since independence in 1991.
The “Desert of Forbidden Art” is scheduled to open to general audiences in New York this week.
But art is a closely monitored affair in Uzbekistan. In a cruel irony, Uzbek authorities have followed in their paranoid predecessor’s path, apparently reacting against the film, The Times reports.
[L]ate last year Uzbek officials abruptly gave the Nukus Museum 48 hours to evacuate one of its two exhibition buildings, so staff members ended up stacking hundreds of fragile canvases and paper works on the floor of the other space. The building has since stood empty, its fate unknown, and more than 2,000 works are no longer on view at the museum, more formally known as the Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art. The museum’s director, Marinika M. Babanazarova, who has fiercely guarded the collection for 27 years, was not permitted to travel to the United States for a trip that was to include a screening of the documentary at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
To those who know Karakalpakstan as the remote, arid and environmentally devastated corner of Uzbekistan once watered by the Aral Sea, it may come as a surprise to hear that its bleak capital, Nukus, is home to one of the world’s greatest collections of Soviet avant garde art.
Now, a film about this once secret collection has hit the silver screen. The Desert of Forbidden Art, a documentary by filmmakers Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev about Igor Savitsky, the man who spent his life collecting the banned Soviet art, his museum and its collection, is touring art museums and film festivals around the world. Click here for a list of screenings.
Savitsky first went to Karakalpakstan in 1950 as member of an archaeological expedition, and, after falling in love with the region’s isolated art scene, he stayed. In 1966, he persuaded the local authorities in Nukus that the city needed a museum of art, and opened it with hundreds of paintings donated by Tashkent-based artist Ural Tansykbayev.
Thanks to Nukus’ remoteness from Moscow politics and local officials’ ignorance of art, Savitsky collected some 40,000 paintings by Soviet artists banned for ideological reasons, artists who refused to paint propaganda in a social realist style.
