Bahtiyar Khudainazarov

Tajik filmmaker, winner of the Venice Film Festival. Born May 29, 1965 in Dushanbe. “I love peripheries. There is an interesting tension on the margins. The coexistence of different nations, cultures. They are trying to live together, to create something or the opposite, to destroy. There is something in the air. A place on the edge. When a person is on the edge of an important decision, a crisis: this is the point where it is interesting to study that person,” Bahtiyar has explained. Khudainazarov was the first of the Central Asian directors that in the 1990s began to actively participate in European festivals and got the recognition for Tajik cinematography. With his debut work, Bakhtiyor managed to predict the feeling of orphanhood that Tajikistan would soon experience during the civil war. Khudainazarov’s most vivid film, Luna Papa, continued the impudent philosophical search of the young filmmaker. In 2012, the author directed the environmental drama Waiting for the Sea about the tragedy of the Aral Sea . “We have lost the sea inside us and are now drying. We are becoming a desert and a steppe, where only a dusty and salty wind walks.” Khudainazarov died and was buried in 2015 in Berlin.