Man Follows Birds (Ali Khamraev, 1975).
A young poet embarks on an odyssey of self-actualization in Uzbek director Ali Khamraev’s Man Follows Birds (1975). When he observes the gentle blossoming of mountain almond flowers, a close-up lingers on his enchanted face as he brushes the branches before him and kisses their soft petals. A solemn, choir-like voice deepens the sacredness of the moment—the awe one feels for nature—and perhaps, the sacredness of cinema itself.
Man Follows Birds emerges from the tradition of Soviet poetic cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, exemplified by filmmakers such as Sergei Parajanov and Andrei Tarkovsky. Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1969) is particularly echoed in Khamraev’s film, especially in its sumptuous costumes and elegiac engagements with folk tradition that predate the Soviet era. The attentive close-ups of the poet’s transfixed face, and the slow pans across shifting landscapes as the characters traverse from one place to another emphasize the rich cultural and spiritual traditions of Central Asia. Khamraev, like Parajanov and Tarkovsky, used poetic visual language as a ploy to circumvent the strictures of socialist realism. But it is his ability to move between genres that proved the longevity of his career. Unlike Tarkovsky and Parajanov, who suffered under the regime’s censorship, Khamraev learned to work within it. Khamraev is a poet who had to make action films while nursing the dream of making a film about his father, who perished in the Second World War. Like many Soviet filmmakers, Khamraev’s legacy is a complicated one.
Cinema in Central Asia remains one of the most elusive phenomena in global film history. Its trajectory is inseparable from the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, under whose grip and gaze its most prominent auteurs lived and worked, fought censorship, and produced enduring masterpieces. While some names from the USSR broke through the Iron Curtain and entered the canon of world cinema—among them Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, and Kira Muratova—their Uzbek contemporary Ali Khamraev remains, regrettably, less recognized outside his native land.
“If there is a giant who sits astride the history of Uzbek cinema,” wrote critic Kent Jones, “it’s Ali Khamraev. One of those rare talents like Welles or Godard or Scorsese whose love for the medium is so intense that his best films burst with crisscrossing energies and insights, like a fireworks display.” Khamraev’s relative obscurity is not incidental. It reflects a convergence of historical and structural forces: the international isolation of the USSR during the peak of his career; the imperial chauvinism embedded within Soviet cultural hierarchies, which relegated Central Asia to the periphery of a Moscow-centric cinematic order; and the economic and institutional collapse that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In other words, in the USSR, the films which were chosen for international exposure were Russian productions. Even domestically, Soviet Central Asian films were less prioritized, generally limited only to regional screenings.
Last year, New York’s Asia Film Society, in partnership with Anthology Film Archives, held “Eastern Notions: Five Films by Ali Khamraev,” the first retrospective of his oeuvre in New York, inviting the 88-year-old Khamraev in person. Over six decades, Khamraev has made more than 20 films as diverse as comedies, neorealist, and avant-garde dramas, and the uniquely Soviet “eastern” or “ostern,” a regional variant of the American western set in Soviet Central Asia. Still active well into his late career, his most recent film, the documentary The Lilac Wind of Parajanov (2025), is dedicated to Sergei Parajanov. The retrospective offered a rare opportunity to reassess a body of work long marginalized by both Soviet historiography and Western film canons.
Ali Khamraev was born in 1937 to a Tajik father and a Ukrainian mother in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (now Uzbekistan). His relationship with cinema began with his father, Ergash Khamraev, who was a screenwriter and actor. Before his death on the front near Moscow, Ergash starred in the lead role in Nabi Ganiyev’s 1931 film The Ascent; Khamraev would later dedicate to him his most fragmentary and complex film, I Remember You (1985). During the Second World War, many Soviet writers and filmmakers, including Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, were sent to Central Asia to continue cinematic production and sustain war efforts. The three major Soviet film studios—Lenfilm, Mosfilm, and VUKFU (Kyiv)—were evacuated to Alma-Ata (now Almaty), Ashkhabad, Stalinabad (now Dushanbe), Frunze (now Bishkek), and Tashkent. The war created an opportunity for Central Asian filmmakers to work with the experienced masters, though they were often relegated to the roles of assistants to Russian directors. Growing up in Tashkent, Khamraev was immersed in a vibrant cultural atmosphere. His house, situated right across the Tashkent film studio, was frequented by expatriate intellectuals and filmmakers.
Russian filmmakers were key players in the media apparatus of the Soviet Union, and they played a crucial part in the foundation of Central Asian cinema. From the 1920s onwards, they were sent to the region to make early narrative films. The productions made in that period either trafficked in images of local exoticism for the Soviet viewer, as in The Minaret of Death (Vyacheslav Viskovsky, 1924) and The Leper (Oleg Frelikh, 1928), or celebrated socialist ideals like female liberation, as in The Muslim Woman (Dmitri Bassalygo, 1925), which dramatized the unveiling of the religious woman. Given the long-standing tradition of veiling women in Turkestan (now Central Asia), early Soviet films such as The Muslim Woman were meant to actively promote women’s rights and help turn women into liberated, hardworking Soviet subjects.
Without Fear (Ali Khamraev, 1971).
This tension between Soviet progress and Islamic cultural heritage, between modernity and tradition became a recurring theme for Khamraev, explored in his early neorealist dramas, such as his arguably most famous work, Without Fear (1971). Set in the 1920s, in a rural hamlet called a kishlak, the film follows a 14-year-old defiant girl played by Dilorom Kambarova, who would become a Khamraev regular. Captivated by the Leninist promise of equality and feminism, she publicly burns her paranja—a long robe paired with a rigid horsehair net that covers the face. Opposed to the girl’s fervor stands Gulsara (Tamara Shakirova), the wife of a young commissar (Rustam Sagdullayev), who refuses to unveil. “Paranja does not bother anyone,” she says to her husband, “it’s possible to work and study and raise children wearing it.”
Khamraev’s vision is strikingly complex and different from the early agitprop, where Uzbek women were played by white Russian actresses as in The Muslim Woman. Without Fear depicts unveiling not as a simple act of liberation but as a painful and disorienting process. Women’s bodies become sites of coercion for both forces at play: traditional patriarchal structures and the nascent project of Soviet modernity. This friction is mirrored in the growing ambivalence of the commissar, who becomes increasingly unsure whether forced unveiling is justifiable. Reminiscent of the Iranian New Wave—particularly in its emphasis on women and oppressed minorities and commitment to pared-down observational realism—Khamraev’s vision tempers ideology and uncertainty, punctuated by the suspenseful chords by the film’s composer, Rumil Vildanov.
Upon the release of Without Fear, the phrase “the emancipated woman of the East”—passionately delivered by Kambarova’s character—would be immediately picked up as a slogan for justifying the Soviet project in Central Asia.After the October Revolution in 1917, when the Soviets took control over the vast territories of Turkestan, they faced the significant challenge of penetrating the rural settlements with Bolshevik ideology.In Uzbekistan, deeply religious and largely illiterate rural communities met Soviet rule with suspicion—outbreaks turned into a civil war. The resistance found its most enduring symbol in the Basmaschi fighters, insurgents who moved through deserts and mountains, evading Soviet control. Decades later, they would become fixtures—reframed and mythologized—across Khamraev’s trilogy of easterns: Extraordinary Commissar (1970), The Seventh Bullet (1972), and The Bodyguard (1979).
“Of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important,” famously declared Lenin. Across Central Asia, Soviet officials quickly established local committees and proceeded to build film production facilities to churn out films of an educational nature. In the hands of the Bolsheviks, cinema became a powerful ideological instrument: first as a means of disseminating new doctrines, later a tool of rampant control. Makeshift screenings were held in villages, where people gathered, stimulated by curiosity and the novelty of the medium. The birth of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic coincided with the launching of the Uzbekfilm studio, both founded in 1924, cementing film as part of state apparatus.
In many respects, Khamraev focused on the same themes of early ideological cinema—local exoticism, which he at times managed to subvert, and the emancipation of Muslim women—but coming not from Moscow, but the Central Asian periphery. He graduated from the prestigious VGIK, the Russian State University of Cinematography during the Thaw, a time of cultural and political liberalization of the Soviet Union in the 1960s following Stalin’s rule. Alongside a new generation of Central Asian filmmakers trained in Moscow, Khamraev returned home eager to experiment. Already working on the ambitious script of White White Storks, Khamraev agreed to make a state-commissioned film: “I needed to build my reputation,” he later explained. His directorial feature debut Yor-yor (1964) is a light-hearted comedy musical made for the 40th anniversary of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. “When they gave me this commission,” Khamraev recalled, “I thought I loved comedies—I'd give it a try.”Yor-yor follows a young Uzbek man (Bakhtiyor Ikhtiyarov) as he tries to find the love of his life, whose captivating singing he had glimpsed on television. Set in sun-drenched Uzbekistan and redolent with dances and eye-pleasing scenery, the film unfolds as a sweet, exoticist fantasy. Yor-yor joined the ranks of the many “postcard films” produced at the time, particularly those set in the Caucasus. The most iconic example would later become Leonid Gaidai’s Kidnapping, Caucasian Style (1967), a film beloved by many post-Soviet viewers till today.
White White Storks (Ali Khamraev, 1966).
While Khamraev’s debut conformed to established tropes and expectations, it was not long before he encountered censorship. Two years after the buoyant Yor-yor, he shifted gears with White White Storks (1966), a beautiful neorealist drama about forbidden love in a remote mountain kishlak. A young woman, Malika (Sairam Isayeva), is forced to marry a man she does not love, who moves in with her and her parents. The family also takes in a lodger, a Kyrgyz outsider named Kayum (Bolot Beyshenaliev) who has run away from an arranged marriage imposed by his mother. Serendipitously facing mirrored circumstances, Malika and Kayum fall in love, but their relationship poses a challenge to the society governed by old ways.
Khamraev introduces Malika in bed beside her husband, the two turned away from one another. A high-angle long shot emphasizes their emotional distance. Moments later, Khamraev shows the woman standing with her back to her husband as he leaves for work, reinforcing her sense of alienation and loneliness. These visual details early on delicately subvert the audience’s expectations surrounding the film’s central metaphor: the arrival of the storks. In an early scene, a real stork knocks on the door, interrupting a merry dinner hosted by Malika’s parents, during which Malika was forced to listen to a slew of thinly veiled jokes about her impending pregnancy—traditionally signified by the arrival of a stork. Yet the bird comes to signify something else entirely: the inevitability of change.
Shot in soft black and white by Khamraev’s regular collaborator Dilshat Fatkhulin, the film offers a portrait of rural Uzbek society in the post-civil war period, after Soviet authority had been firmly imposed. Khamraev maneuvers within a propagandistic framework that casts regional customs as backward and small-minded and captures the stubborn persistence of the old ways. Rather than adopting a didactic stance, Khamraev foregrounds the political and emotional ambiguity of his protagonists. Malika is torn between filial devotion and the inexorable advancement of change. The film failed to resonate with Soviet officials and was promptly “put on the shelf,” as the euphemism went, effectively banning it from release. In later interviews, Khamraev noted that the film has never been broadcast on Uzbek television nor screened in cinemas in Uzbekistan.
The Seventh Bullet (Ali Khamraev, 1972).
While Central Asian filmmakers certainly benefited from the Soviet know-how and funding, they suffered from its censorship and ideological control. “One film for the communists, one for myself” became Khamraev’s modus operandi. For communists, Khamraev would become an undisputed master of easterns. In the second half of the 1960s Soviet directors inspired by classic Hollywood westerns opened a new avenue for their version of adventure-action films. Socialist Europe specialized in “red westerns” akin to Italian spaghetti westerns, with Czechoslovakia’s Lemonade Joe (Oldrich Lipský1964) as a notably popular example. While red westerns were set in America’s “Wild West,” easterns were set in Central Asia. The lone hero usually became a righteous Soviet commissar, the “Indian savage” replaced by a Muslim Basmachi figure, and the familiar damsel in distress remaining.
With the unexpected popularity of Vladimir Motyl’s White Sun of the Desert (1969), the eastern proved to be an ideologically supple genre, effectively used to mythologize the very recent past: the uprising of the Basmachi. While White Sun of the Desert employs comedic and musical elements and features white actors playing indigenous characters, Khamraev’s easterns are far more sober affairs.
In The Seventh Bullet (1972), one of the most acclaimed features in Khamraev’s oeuvre, Soviet commander Maksumov (Suimenkul Chokmorov) pursues the Basmachi leader Khairulla (Khamza Umarov). A young woman, Aigul, played by Dilorom Kambarova following her successful turn in Without Fear, wants to help the commander, as she is being forced into an arranged marriage with Khairulla to be his second wife.
Scripted by Tarkovsky’s collaborators Andrei Konchalovsky (Ivan’s Childhood [1962] and Andrei Rublev [1966]) and Fridrikh Gorenshteyn (Solaris [1972]), The Seventh Bullet is an adrenaline-fueled, escapist adventure rich in horseback chases and shootouts. As Maksumov works his way toward Khairulla, he deliberately surrenders himself to the rebels in order to be brought to their commander and to his own detachment, which had abandoned their post and joined Khairulla’s rebels. Later, when Maksumov reaches Khairulla, Khamraev frames their confrontation in a wide shot under the blistering desert sun. Maksumov delivers a passionate monologue to the rebel leader and his deserted garrison, emerging as a hero.
Unlike Khamraev’s earlier realist films, White White Storks and Without Fear, The Seventh Bullet allows little room for ambiguity in their characters’ politics. Maksumov, in contrast to the young commissar in Without Fear, is smug and confident in the potential of the Soviet takeover: “I feel pity for you,” he says to his former detachment, “because you are illiterate, deceived, and stupid.” The Seventh Bullet, nevertheless, remains a signature film in Khamraev’s oeuvre, frequently selected for international festival retrospectives. In its sequence of relentless chases, and in its embrace of western-like aesthetics and a dust-filled, scorching atmosphere, there lies an indelible sense of humanity. One wonders if Khamraev saw himself in the same dilemma faced by Maksumov: someone who was both enriched and constrained by the Soviet regime.
The Bodyguard (Ali Khamraev, 1979).
Khamraev’s later eastern, The Bodyguard (1979), lacks The Seventh Bullet’s vivacity and vibrant characters. The script, written by Khamraev himself, revolves around a MacGuffin—a tribal stamp called tamga, a symbol of power for whoever lays their hands on it. The film is notable for featuring actors from Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979): Alexander Kaidanovsky, playing a guide of a different sort, is a mountain hunter who escorts the Basmachi leader, played by Anatoly Solonitsyn, Kaidanovsky’s Stalker costar, to the Soviet officials.
While in The Seventh Bullet Maksumov’s garrison wrestles with both the fervor for Allah and with revolutionary ideology, Kaidanovsky’s mountain hunter simply follows Soviet rules without ever questioning them. Solonitsyn’s Basmachi leader fails to authentically embody an Uzbek tribal chief. The casting of white Russian actors in Indigenous roles points to the enduring cultural discrimination of the early 1920s agitprop. At the same time, it reflects Khamraev’s attempt to infuse the eastern genre with a more philosophical dimension. The journey across the dry, rugged plains and the snow-covered peaks of Tajikistan is akin to Stalker’s spiritual pilgrimage. The result is, as Russian film historian Alexander Fedorov observes, “a clash of genres,” leaving The Bodyguard too subdued for adventure audiences and too uneven for viewers seeking a philosophical parable.
The specter of Tarkovsky is present throughout Khamraev’s work. They met already at VGIK and became friends after visiting East Berlin in 1973 for a Soviet film festival. It is thanks to Tarkovsky that Khamraev made his most personal and complex work, I Remember You. Recounting to Tarkovsky how he had found his father’s grave in the woods not far from Moscow, the Russian director (after a shot or two of vodka) made Khamraev vow to make a film about it. “Promise me, you are not going to make films like The Seventh Bullet anymore! Make a film about your father!” It wouldn’t be until ten years later did Khamraev finally make an elegy for his father.
I Remember You blends surrealist imagery with semi-autobiographical elements. The film begins in Samarkand, the ancient Silk Road city, where Kim (Vyacheslav Bogachyov), the middle-aged, mixed-race protagonist, promises his ailing mother that he will find his father’s grave. Soon, reality starts to collide with visions and impressions, creating a dreamlike logic as Kim travels across Russia. He encounters a priest, a Cossack wedding, a mysterious woman on a train, a scammer, and even a sheep. Meanwhile, his mother’s twin sister arrives in Samarkand from Leningrad, and it becomes unclear whether the woman actually exists. As the film continues, the characters’ identities become increasingly fractured and totemic, standing for something larger than themselves: memory, ritual, and myth. This deeply impressionistic work invites the viewer on a metaphysical train journey through the landscape of memory to encounter family members long gone.
I Remember You (Ali Khamraev, 1985).
Shot at the tail end of the Soviet era, the film feels prescient. History and memory were effectively forbidden, as the October revolution was framed as the beginning of a new temporal order. Today, both older and younger generations grapple with the complex legacy of the USSR. In the wake of Khamraev’s most mature work, contemporary Central Asian filmmakers, such as Uzbek artist Saodat Ismailova, Kazakh-Korean visual artist Alexander Ugay, and Kazakh-Tajik filmmaker Nazira Karimi, similarly excavated histories long suppressed by the Soviet regime.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Khamraev set out to shoot an ambitious epic about Talerlane, a 14th century ruler of the Timurid Empire, encompassing modern-day Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia. His friendship with Michelangelo Antonioni—whom Khamraev befriended during Antonioni’s visit to the USSR—helped him partially finance the project. The production, which included casting Sean Connery as a lead, fell through due to the delays created by the Soviet bureaucracy. In quiet desperation, Khamraev left for Italy, where in 1998 he made Bo Ba Bu, a French-Italian co-production that went largely under the radar.
His relationship with his native Uzbekistan, post USSR, continues to be a complex balancing act between passion projects and state-commissioned films. While Khamraev has made documentaries about major artists as Parajanov and Igor Savitsky, he has also accepted to make a nostalgia-infused project akin to Yor-yor, The Scent of Melon in Samarkand (2021), and a documentary about Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s former authoritarian president.
“In terms of auteur films that I got to make, there are really only seven or eight, and another ten or twelve are all commissioned works,” Khamraev said during a Q&A at the Asia Society, “but those were important to me to win the right to make those auteur films.” Echoing Martin Scorsese’s oft-cited mantra “one for them, one for me” as a strategy for sustaining a long career, Khamraev acknowledges the raison d'être of a Soviet filmmaker. Towing the line with authorities allowed him to master the dynamism of easterns, the levity of musicals, and the nuance of neorealism. Khamraev’s continuous obscurity within the global film canon speaks, as critic Sam Goff suggests, to the fact that his career does not conform to the prevailing image of the Soviet auteur as a figure of individual expression forged through risk and sacrifice—an image that has canonized filmmakers like Tarkovsky and Parajanov. Yet, the cinema of Ali Khamraev, looked at in its entirety, foregrounds not only ambivalence and contradiction, but also a profound reverence for the medium itself.