Gulcha Tashbayeva

A romance by Ali Khamraev with musical numbers interspersed

The setting is Central Asia during the Russian civil war. In the post-revolutionary twenties, when the power in European Russia was (officially) "fully in the hands of the workers and peasants", but the fight against the Basmachi rebels was in full swing. When a Red Army detachment captures Sultan Mazar, the brains behind the Bazmachi contingent, a decision is made to escort urgently the prisoner to the Bukhara province. The difficult mission is entrusted to a grizzled mountain trapper and conscientious revolutionary called Mirzo. His expertise is essential to traverse the precarious paths and steep mountain ridges along the way, impossible terrain for the inexperienced. A group consisting of Mirzo, his brother Kova, the Sultan, his daughter Zaranghis and slave Saifulla set off on this journey. They are forced to fight on the mountain ridges as well as negotiate the natural dangers and harsh elements.

The artificial brain Sig, created under the guidance of Professor Yavorovsky, disappeared in one of the research institutes. Meanwhile, strange phenomena are happening in the city: all the zoo animals have been released from their cages, and the books in the city's book depository have been mixed up. And Whitefish, having mastered the accumulated experience of science and fiction accumulated by mankind, creates an artificial organism himself, returns to the professor and is soon sent to the constellation Gemini.

A dying woman’s wish sends her son on a train journey from the steppes of Uzbekistan to the Russian hinterland in search of his father’s grave. Just as the traveler’s home city of Samarkand is situated on the border between East and West, Khamraev balances his film on the edge of two cultures, evoking the soul of Russia and the crumbling beauty of what was once the Silk Road.

Man Follows Birds is a coming-of-age story of a young Uzbek poet surrounded by violence. Farouk is fascinated by trees and Khamraev films him with a lot of melancholy and tenderness. Cast apart because he’s poor and his father’s drunk, Farouk is not happy in his village. When his father dies, he decides to go in the mountains with his best friends. Looking for nature at its purest, the two teenage boys have to deal with the cruelty of violent barbarians. Their trip will also make them meet a lost orphan girl and a wise beggar.

A Russian doctor is invited to work at Afghanistan's top hospital during the war, and sees firsthand the carnage caused by the Islamist mujaheddin as they attempt to overthrow the socialist government.

Three women’s lives intersect in a small town in Uzbekistan following the Second World War. The first, an old woman trapped in a forced marriage; the second, a schoolteacher intent on imposing progress on the remote region; the third, a young woman determined to build her own house without her husband’s or the state’s approval.

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