THIS YEAR'S RETROSPECTIVE WITH THE MOTTO ENTER THE CONTACT ZONE
News – 16.05.2024
ENTER THE CONTACT ZONE is a reference to the momentous meeting of international filmmakers who, in the course of the Tashkent Film Festival, realised an alternative concept to the European- and US-dominated cinema landscape. Between 1968 and 1988, ten editions of this international film festival were held in the capital of the former Uzbek Soviet Republic, which exclusively screened cinematic works from African, Asian and (from 1976) Latin American countries. The Tashkent Film Festival was a social space for creative exchange and the promotion of transnational alliances in order to bring marginalised cinematographies into a new centre.
In this sense, the Tashkent Film Festival served as a driver for the strengthening of South-South relations and the decentring of Western-influenced paradigms, but from today's perspective it must also be understood as an instrumentalised tool of Soviet cultural diplomacy and geopolitical-strategic propaganda. The aim of the IFFI #33 retrospective is to take a differentiated look at the mechanisms of the Tashkent Film Festival and to carefully unravel the web of political, cultural and artistic motives. In doing so, we also embark on a search for traces of the beginnings of the IFFI, which - like other film festivals since the 1980s - has dedicated itself to the cinematographies of the "Three Continents". ENTER THE CONTACT ZONE thus also stands for a critical reflection on current festival practice in global film networks as well as for the possibility of jointly exploring new perspectives.
The retrospective begins in 1966 with the film NE'NOST' (TENDERNESS) by El'er Išmuchamedov in Tashkent, leads to a Japanese samurai film (SAMURAI REBELLION by m Kobayashi, 1967), to a satirically exaggerated post-colonial Senegal in Ousmane Sembène's XALA (1975) and a brilliant comedy about the colonial hangover in India with INTERVIEW (1970) by Mrinal Sen. After Godfrey Reggio's POWAQQATSI (1988), two short film programmes span an arc into the present. One focuses on the filmmaking of young Central Asian filmmakers, the other explores the question of how cinematic forms and themes can be translated into the present and future.
The retrospective was developed with Valeryia Kim from the DAVRA Research Collective in Tashkent and supported by the Centre for East European Studies at the University of Innsbruck.
