QYZQARAS

Tremors Beneath the Surface: Women’s Intimacies, Landscapes, and Silences from Central Asia

Presented by Asian Movie Night, curated by Malika Mukhamejan from Qyzqaras Film Festival

This program brings together a selection of films from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and diasporic voices across the region, offering a rare window into women’s stories shaped by political absences, intergenerational echoes, and the struggle for self-definition. These works do not shout. Instead, they observe. They listen. They record. And in doing so, they ask how women live through historical rupture, private grief, and quiet endurance.
Split into two parts (one grounded in narrative and documentary realism, the other experimental and poetic) the program traces how memory, identity, and resistance are preserved not just through overt action but through gestures, atmospheres, and unanswered questions.

Part II: Echoes and Traces – Experimental Cartographies of Love, Loss, and Memory
Experimental and essay films
The second part of the program shifts into the realm of experimental film, where the body, history, and language are often obscured or absent. These works explore the thresholds between the visible and the invisible, creating alternative spaces to grieve, to dream, to
connect. Through fragments, metaphors, and intimate archives, the films draw new maps for understanding identity (queer, maternal, diasporic, wounded) in a region where so much has been silenced.

Kündelık.Almaty
by Aiganym Mukhamejan
Kazakhstan, 2024, 11’
«Kündelık.Almaty» begins with Aiganym Mukhamejan’s spontaneous decision to film her day in Almaty, Kazakhstan. With a camera in hand, she captures her personal interactions and the lively energy of her surroundings. This episode serves as a filmic diary, showcasing moments of reflection by the river, lively scenes at local bazaars, and a meaningful visit to a healer. Through her lens, we see a day filled with discovery and personal growth, offering a glimpse into both the city’s pulse and her inner thoughts. This film is more than a travel vlog; it’s an intimate portrait of a day that represents healing and introspection.

Voiceless
by Saadat Sataeva
Kyrgyzstan, 2025, 15’
Voiceless is an essay film exploring a long-distance relationship between two anonymous young women (one in Ukraine, the other in Kyrgyzstan). We never see their faces. Instead, the film lingers on the details of their everyday environments: quiet domestic spaces, passing landscapes, traces of their presence. Their connection unfolds through text exchanges and silent phone calls, where emotion is carried by pauses, glances, and the unsaid. Through absence and atmosphere, Voiceless becomes a tender meditation on queer love, separation, and the quiet forms of communication that endure despite distance and invisibility.

Lady of Heaven
by Darya Andijan
Netherlands, 2024, 9’
This is a journey through the skies on a flying carpet with my grandmother who has just been released from a concentration camp in Xinjiang, China. As we soar, the carpet transforms into a tapestry of Sumerian myths, dreams, and fragmented memories, intertwining the past with the present of maternal history in Turkestan.

Balqaş Jyry
by Artcom
Kazakhstan, 2025, 19’
In this video essay dedicated to Lake Balqaş, the artists of the Artcom collective draw on the form of epic poetry (zhyr) and the tradition of qazaqylyq to tell the story of a profound bond between nature and humans, a bond fractured by colonialism, industrialization, and ecological violence. One of their aims is to restore the lake’s agency: its capacity for resistance, its right to regeneration, and its future.

Cineville valid at the door and bookable online on the day of the event!