Transoxiana Dreams

Almagul Menlibayeva’s film Transoxania Dreams tells a tale of ecological devastation in the guise of a mythological narrative staged in the vast landscape of her native Kazakhstan, ravaged by 60 years of Soviet occupation. Transoxania Dreams is filmed in the brutally changed region of the Aral Sea, where its indigenous people live in the Aralkum, the desert of a once thriving region now entirely devoid of water due to radical Soviet irrigation policies. The region of Transoxiana (Greek for ‘across the Oxus’) in southwestern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, once the eastern part of the Hellenistic regime under Alexander the Great and the former homeland of the nomadic tribes of Persia and Turan at the banks of the Oxus River, remained an important trade region along the Northern Silk Road with flourishing civilizations and fertile plains for many centuries. Afflicted by former Soviet policies and abandoned by commercial and cultural interests, today, Transoxania lies bare and stripped in a surreal state of existence with discarded fishing fleets on dusty terrain, ravaged by metal scavengers while its inhabitants look on as the sea keeps receding into a far and unreachable distance of a seemingly better world.