She Exists Elsewhere

In the history of Central Asian cinema, women have often existed elsewhere — in the margins of the frame, in silences that resist translation, in gestures that outlive the stories written for them. On screen, their images carried the weight of allegory: the face of progress, the mother of the nation, the symbol of endurance. But beyond these projections, another presence has always persisted — intimate, unruly, and irreducible.

From the Soviet-era works Dzhamilya (Irina Poplavskaya, 1969) and Without Fear (Ali Khamraev, 1972), where women shimmer as ideals of emancipation yet remain confined to archetype, to Rustam Khamdamov’s fractured poetics in Vocal Parallels (2005) and Gulshat Omarova’s grounded defiance in Native Dancer (2008), the image begins to tremble and shift.

In the contemporary moment, this “elsewhere” turns inward. Malika Mukhamejan’s Longer Than a Day (2024) and Zaka Abdrakhmanova’s Dad Croaked on Saturday (2024) trace interior geographies of time, distance, and belonging — films where subjectivity is felt rather than declared.

Spanning half a century, these films unmake the certainty of representation. What remains is not progress but a new grammar of seeing — one built from pauses, from distance, from the insistence of her image to exist otherwise. She exists elsewhere — within cinema, but never entirely of it. (Malika Mukhamejan)

Malika Mukhamejan is a filmmaker and curator from Kazakhstan, founder of Qyzqaras Film Festival in Almaty. She focuses on women’s stories and the complexities of representation in Central Asian cinema, working across curatorial and directorial practices.