East of East

For the second year, ENFF expands its view to Central Asia, a film culture shaped by many of the same historical experiences as those explored throughout our programme. Between the steppe, China and Russia lives a cinema of remarkable courage and singularity.

Across radically different forms, these films draw on local mythology, history and present-day realities. They move from a snow-covered murder mystery haunted by colonial memory and family secrets, to a poetic journey along a Kazakh river that becomes a portrait of women’s lives within patriarchy. Two films from a region where the past is never quite past, and where cinema finds strikingly original ways of making sense of the present. 

Marko Grba Singh and Stefan Malešević, film programmers

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  Mergen
  While investigating a hunter’s death in a remote Kyrgyz mining town, a young investigator is haunted by the same visions that once drove his father to madness.
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  River Dreams
  Along a Kazakh river, women lay bare love, rage and survival. Their voices cut through water and silence, turning scars into resistance.