CURATED BY QYZQARAS FILM FESTIVAL

This programme brings together a small number of films by women filmmakers from Central Asia that engage with queer experience, intimacy and non-normative forms of belonging. There are few of them – and this is not accidental.

Today, these films exist in a different context – one in which they can no longer circulate at home. This year, Kazakhstan’s government passed a law restricting so-called ‘LGBT propaganda’. Presented as a measure to ‘protect children’, it effectively prohibits any public representation of queer lives.

Queer cinema in the region has always been extremely limited, and even before this law it was rarely screened. Now, as a direct consequence of this legislation, we are no longer able to show such films at the Qyzqaras Film Festival. Even if new films are made, they cannot be publicly presented.

The programme brings together fiction films, personal essays and documentaries. These works do not seek to explain or define. They remain fragmentary, often quiet, sometimes unresolved. They stay close to lived experience – its contradictions, its hesitations, its difficulty.

This programme does not attempt to represent the queer community of Central Asia. It does something more simple: it insists that these lives exist – even as the structures around them try to make them invisible.

Malika Mukhamejan (Festival director Qyzqaras Film Festival )