Saodat Ismailova: Coming of Age in the World of Cinema

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 250, ‘ON SET’

My story is a very simple one, although it might not be the kind you would expect to hear from a female director from Uzbekistan. My father is a filmmaker. After studying at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, he worked as a director of photography in Uzbek cinema from the 1960s onwards. In 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he created a director of photography faculty in Uzbekistan. He understood the importance of establishing an educational system for filmmakers within Central Asia and became totally invested in his pedagogical career. Now in his 80s, he still teaches. 

Growing up in Tashkent, we lived in an apartment building where all our neighbours worked in the film industry. It was like a cinematographic ecosystem: downstairs was a cinematheque; on the ground floor was a restaurant where all the filmmakers dined; and across the street was Uzbekfilm, the biggest film studio in Central Asia at the time.

I studied film directing. My first feature, 40 Days of Silence (2014), is about four generations of women who spend 40 days together in one house, and one of them takes a vow of silence. It took a long time to make – nine years, in fact! I started writing it in 2005 and it debuted at the Berlinale in 2014. The international co-production was shown at several film festivals. Entering into the international film industry, I encountered certain expectations in terms of fundraising, production time, permissions and co-producer dynamics that were complicated for me to grasp. I have since understood they all have concrete explanations, of course; but you can only learn them by doing.

I’m happy I had that experience, though, because it’s the best way to understand how the industry works – from initial idea to distribution. Nevertheless, I found the process quite limiting. So, I started making films for myself – although, at that point, I had no expectation of entering the art world. In fact, during the first couple of years, being referred to as an artist required some psychological adaptation on my part because I considered myself a film director.

I love making smaller films without knowing where they might end up being shown or even what the budget may be; it gives you the freedom to create an experience. There was a point, though, when I started asking myself whether my films had an audience or any meaning for others – or if they only had meaning for me. It took time for me to move from conventional filmmaking to making films that are shown alongside one another within installations.

In an exhibition, audiences interact with my work totally differently because they can see my films more than once, from different perspectives, or step out at any moment. At my recent show, ‘A Seed Under Our Tongue’ (2024–25), at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, I showed six of my films in a very large, open space. This helped me think about the circulatory flow of the exhibition, especially when audio spilled over from one work into another. Yet, this bleed between works created a larger, unified narrative that encouraged a more elaborate form of reading my films in tandem with one another.

I’m working on a new project about the Arslanbob walnut forest in south Kyrgyzstan, famed for its hallucinatory effects, attributed to the release of carbon dioxide by the walnuts at sunset and the presence of juglone, a natural toxin. It’s already the subject of one of my films – the three-channel Arslanbob (2023–ongoing) – and behind the title of my exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca, but I think several more works will draw on that location. There aren’t many forests in Central Asia – there are more steppes and mountains – so Arslanbob stands out as something of a relic from our shared natural archetypes.

As told to Saim Demircan

This article first appeared in frieze issue 250 with the headline ‘Stepping Out’

Saodat Ismailova’s The Haunted and Bibi Seshanbe will be on view at Berlinische Galerie, Berlin until 28 April

^{Main image: Saodat Ismailova, Arslanbob (detail), 2023–24, video still. Courtesy: © Saodat Ismailova}