Pitt to Host "Cine-stan: Turkmen and Kazakh Films" Oct. 12-26

PITTSBURGH-Pitt's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Center for Russian and East European Studies, and Film Studies Program will present "Cine-stan: Turkmen and Kazakh Films," a festival of contemporary films from Turkmenistan, all of which are U.S. premiers, from Oct. 12 through Oct. 26.

As part of the festival, Martha Brill Olcott, a senior associate with the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., will give a talk titled "Central Asia: Strategic Ally or Security Risk?" at 4:30 p.m. Nov. 2 in 4130 Posvar Hall, 230 S. Bouquet St., Oakland.

"Filmmaking in Turkmenistan has been virtually banned since Saparmurat Niyazov consolidated power after the collapse of the Soviet Union," said Vladimir Padunov, associate director of Pitt's Film Studies Program. "All film makers fled the country in the years leading up to 1997, the year the last feature film was made at Turkmen Film Studios and also the year that Niyazov built a new highway where the film studio once stood."

The films featured in the festival range from Khodjakuli Narliev's Daughter-in-Law (1971), where a woman waits in the Turkmen desert dreaming of her missing husband, a pilot in the Soviet Air Force during WWII, to Murad Aliev's Aura, a polemic dramatization of the narcotics business in Central Asia.

All films will be shown at 8 p.m. in Bellefield Hall's screening room, 315 S. Bellefield Ave., Oakland. Admission is free.

Screening dates, the films, and their directors are as follows:

Oct. 12-Daughter-in-Law (1971), directed by Khodjakuli Narliev;

Oct. 13-Mankurt (1990), directed by Khodjakuli Narliev;

Oct. 19-The Education of a Man (1982), directed by Usman Saparov and Iazgeldy Seidov;

Oct. 20-The Son (1989), directed by Khalmamed Kakabaev; and

Oct. 26-Short films: Aura (1987), directed by Murad Aliev (which was shelved and later destroyed in Turkmenistan); Summer Heat (1988), directed by Darezhan Omirbaev; and Toro (1986), directed by Talgat Temenov.

For more information, visit: www.pitt.edu/~filmst/events/TurkmenFilmSeries/index.htm.

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10/5/06/tmw