Swan Lake

Directed by Saodat Ismailova

Composed of footage from Central Asian film archives, Swan Lake addresses the period running from a decade before to a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The film includes familiar visual markers of the era: long queues outside shops, popular television programs hosted by healers and hypnotists, ballerinas performing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (1876). This was a typical television intermezzo in the late Soviet empire, when high culture often filled the airwaves during moments of political uncertainty, whether the death of another elderly leader or an emergency declared in Moscow. What may be less familiar to Western audiences is the footage drawn from Central Asian films of the same period. These fragments extend the usual visual aesthetics of perestroika into a different regional context, introducing other ethnicities, landscapes, and urban spaces into what is often remembered as a predominantly Russian narrative of late-Soviet culture.