She Exists Elsewhere: Still to come this November

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.

This November, curator-in-residence Malika Mukhamejan invites you to look beyond these projections and towards the intimate, the unruly, and the irreducible.

For THE PAST IS NOT ANOTHER COUNTRY: DOING ARCHIVES DIFFERENTLY, Malika presents two early Soviet works that reveal cinema’s dual function as both instrument and witness of transformation: Без страха (Without Fear) +  Джамиля (Dzhamilya).

This will be followed by the launch of She Exists Elsewhere: Women in Central Asian Cinema, a series which brings together contemporary and archival films, invited guests, discussions, a lecture and a food intervention as a way of questioning, staging and interrogating the role of women in Central Asian cinema.

We welcome influential writers and thinkers Emilia Roig & Mohamed Amjahid for a SİNEMAplural+ in conversation special. Drawing on their recent books, together they will discuss capitalism, racism and authoritarian politics – and how radical care, solidarity and a shift in consciousness can enable social change (in German)

With SİNELECTION we present a preview screening of Mahdi Fleifel’s poetic journey into the heart of exile,  إلى عالم مجهول (To a Land Unknown), followed by a talk with one of the film’s protagonists, Angeliki Papoulia. Plus, more chances to see Hysteria and Das Deutsche Volk.

Finally, Common Visions hosts students and early-career scholars from the Humboldt University for panel-talk Resilience in Times of Democratic Backsliding in Central Europe, followed by a screening of Arjun Talwar’s Listy Z Wilczej (Letters from Wolf Street) and BAFNET return for Zwischen den Zeilen, zwischen den Welten, an evening of film, food and literature (in German). 

Thursday, 27.11., 18:00

THE PAST IS NOT ANOTHER COUNTRY

Без страха(Without Fear)

Tickets

A young Soviet officer is tasked with modernizing a village. This story is set in late-1920s rural Uzbekistan amid Soviet “unveiling” campaigns. The officer is also encouraging women to remove the veil. When a teenage Komsomol girl publicly burns her paranja, reform collides with tradition and religious authority, with tragic consequences. Khamraev’s film remains a keystone of Uzbek cinema for its complex portrait of “emancipation” as imposition, and the costs borne by women’s bodies. 

Thursday, 27.11., 20:00

THE PAST IS NOT ANOTHER COUNTRY

Джамиля(Dzhamilya)

Tickets

In a remote Kyrgyz village during WWII, Dzhamilya marries a man she does not love. As her husband departs to the front, she forms an intense bond with the returning soldier Daniyar. Framed by the memories of the young artist Seit, the film adapts Chingiz Aitmatov’s novella into a tender, conflicted meditation on desire, duty, and the price of transgressing communal norms.

These early Soviet works reveal cinema’s dual function as both instrument and witness of transformation. Within the frames of Без страха (Without Fear) and Джамиля (Dzhamilya), female emancipation is imagined as the visible proof of modernity’s arrival: unveiling becomes spectacle, desire becomes allegory.

Yet behind these grand gestures, the individual subject remains indistinct — her interior world subsumed by the collective ideal she is made to embody. What emerges is a cinema negotiating its own contradictions. The movie strives to construct the image of a liberated woman. However, it leaves the contours of her selfhood unresolved. The image hovers between representation and projection. 

Zum vollständigen Programm des SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA

The October 2025 program at SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA is supported by the Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt, the DROSOS Stiftung, the Fonds Soziokultur, the Allianz Foundation and the Hauptstadtkulturfonds.