Tashkent: The End of an Era

Yakutia — Between The Worlds

2024

A documentary road movie. Traveling across his homeland, the filmmaker explores what Yakut cinema is, and what it means to the Sakha people and to himself.

The Wall

1991

A fragment of the Berlin Wall in the centre of Riga.

Basements on Dybenko Street

2004

In the Russian city of St. Petersburg, in the Dybenko basements, drug addict children survive by taking drugs. This is an attempt to look into this terrible world from the inside.

The Children of Leningradsky

2005

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain an estimated four million children have found themselves living on the streets in the former countries of the Soviet Union. In the streets of Moscow alone there are over 30,000 surviving in this manner at the present time. The makers of the documentary film concentrated on a community of homeless children living hand to mouth in the Moscow train station Leningradsky. Eight-year-old Sasha, eleven-year-old Kristina, thirteen-year-old Misha and ten-year-old Andrej all dream of living in a communal home. They spend winter nights trying to stay warm by huddling together on hot water pipes and most of their days are spent begging. Andrej has found himself here because of disagreements with his family. Kristina was driven into this way of life by the hatred of her stepmother and twelve-year-old Roma by the regular beatings he received from his constantly drunk father. "When it is worst, we try to make money for food by prostitution," admits ...

Neither live nor die in Tashkent

2015

Chronicles of the cultural life of Tashkent (2007 – 2015). From the murder of Mark Weil to the wedding of Alisher Usmanov. Tashkent Biennale, apartment buildings, video art festival, conversations about nothing, amateur performances and operational shooting, advertising and much more. Tashkent, which no longer exists, just as these people are no longer in it.

Grandmother of Russian Feminism

2007

Portrait of a typical European feminist - Olga Lipovskaya (1954-2021), journalist, translator, poet, founder of the women's non-profit organization St. Petersburg Center for Gender Issues (an educational and resource center for women and women's organizations), editor of the samizdat magazine Women's Reading.

Once Upon a Time in Tashkent

2020

Pokser TV short-film

To Live and to Die in Samarkand

2007

Having gone to Samarkand in search of traces of colonial culture, of which there were quite a few left there, having carefully photographed them, we suddenly discovered that it was not the dead buildings that were much more interesting, but the living carriers of this very colonial culture. The result is a film about people who live on the ruins of an empire.

Extinction

2018

The end of the Cold War did not bring about a definitive thaw in the former republics of the Soviet Union, so that today there are several frozen conflicts, unresolved for decades, in that vast territory. As in Transnistria, an unrecognized state, seceded from Moldova since 1990. Kolja is a silent witness of how borders and bureaucracy shape the lives of citizens, finally forced to lose their identity.

When the Water Stops Flowing

2026

Jonathan Stavleu explores, in a stream-of-consciousness video essay, the relationship people have with water and what happens when access to it is taken away. For this work, he examines anecdotal histories he has heard from Estonians, as well as stories from his own family history in the Netherlands, weaving them together into a journal-like narrative.

Aral, Fishing in an Invisible Sea

2004

A documentary film about the three remaining generations of fishermen in the Aral Sea-- Their everyday struggle to survive in one of the most dire and inhospitable places on the planet.

Misha

The tragic story of the greatest soccer player the most have never heard of.