Saodat Ismailova

Saodat Ismailova (b. 1981) is an Uzbek film director whose work focuses on the history of women in Central Asia. After graduating in film making from the Tashkent State Institute, she moved to Europe, where she began exhibiting films about Central Asian culture. She first achieved international recognition with the release of Zukhra, a video installation that recounts the history of Uzbekistan, which won a prize from the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. In 2014, she premiered her first feature film, 40 Days of Silence, at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it was nominated for best debut film. She then went on to make a number of short films while at the Norwegian Office for Contemporary Art and Le Fresnoy, a French contemporary arts studio.

Ismailova has worked to develop and promote Central Asian cinema, both in Uzbekistan and Europe. In 2019, she put together an educational program on contemporary art in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, where she also exhibited the film Q’org’on Chirog; and in 2021, she established the DAVRA collective, in order to research and publicise Central Asian culture. Her other exhibitions in this period have included Her Five Lives (2021), Chillahona (2022) and 18,000 Worlds (2022).

Early life and education
Saodat Ismailova was born in 1981, in Tashkent, the capital of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. She developed a passion for cinema at an early age, inspired by her father, an Uzbek cinematographer, and her grandmother, a storyteller. Ismailova studied film at the Uzbekistan State Institute of Arts and Culture, where she became a fan of the work of Soviet filmmakers Sergei Parajanov and Andrei Tarkovsky, who had broken from the established style of Soviet realism in favour of expressionist and existentialist themes. In 1999, she won the Grand Prize at the Tashkent Film Festival.

Work and exhibitions in Europe
After graduating from the institute, she moved to Treviso in Italy, where she began work for the Fabrica research centre. She also took charge of making documentary films about Central Asian music for Smithsonian Folkways. In 2004, she collaborated with Carlos Casas on her first documentary film Aral: Fishing in an Invisible Sea, which followed Kazakh and Uzbek fishermen as they dealt with the degradation of the titular Aral Sea. The film won the award for Best Documentary at the Torino Film Festival. The following year, she joined the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, in which she started development on a feature film. In 2008, she formed the Central Asian production company MAP. In 2011, she attempted to shoot this feature in Uzbekistan, but had to film in Tajikistan for production reasons.

She gained worldwide recognition at the 2013 Venice Biennale for the video installation Zukhra,     in which a woman recounts the history of Uzbekistan while lying in bed. For the film, she was awarded a $30,000 prize by Amsterdam's EYE Filmmuseum. The following year, she released her debut feature film, 40 Days of Silence,   which she had developed at the Sundance Institute in Utah. The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it was nominated for best debut film.

In 2017, she was artist-in-residence at the Norwegian Office for Contemporary Art and made a short film The Haunted, which covered the extinction of the Turan tiger. She also graduated from the French Contemporary Arts Studio Le Fresnoy, where she had made Stains of Oxus and Two Horizons. She then put together the multimedia piece Qyrq Qyz, which retold a Central Asian legend of 40 warrior women, and was debuted Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) New York, and later at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.

Projects in Central Asia
In 2019, Ismailova exhibited Q’org’on Chirog at the Central for Contemporary Arts in Tashkent (CCAT); she also put together an educational program on contemporary art in Taskhent that lasted a year. The following year, she produced the film Her Five Lives for the Asian Film Archive, which charted the history of Women in Uzbekistan.

In 2021, Ismailova established the DAVRA collective, which brought together artists from throughout Central Asia,  in order to document and publicise local culture. Ismailova participated in DAVRA's 40-day program at Documenta fifteen, where they shared their research on Chilltans, a kind of spirit in Central Asian folklore. That same year, Ismailova had a solo exhibition at Aspan Gallery, Almaty, titled What was my name?.

Return to Europe and recent work
Ismailova exhibited another work at the 2022 Venice Biennale:  Chillahona a three channel video with a reimagined Tashkent traditional Embroidery, film is dedicated to perestroika years in Uzbekistan. Saodat Ismailova was invited to documenta fifteen, as the only Central Asian representative, she made a film which is Central Asian retelling of Cinderella. That same year, she was awarded £25,000 by the EYE Filmmuseum, where she exhibited a collection of her work, titled 18,000 Worlds.

Her films are in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Almaty, Museum of Art.

Style
Ismailova's films focus on Central Asian history, paying particular attention to women's history and cultural practices. Her work has been described as "hypnotic", due to her slow pacing and rhythmic editing style. The Eye Filmmuseum described her work as allowing the viewer to hear images and see sound. Ismailova herself said that her work intends to invite the viewer to "actively participate in the experience".