Saodat Ismailova

Saodat Ismailova (b. 1981) is an Uzbek film director whose work focuses on the history of women in Central Asia. After graduating in film making from the Tashkent State Institute, she moved to Europe, where she began exhibiting films about Central Asian culture. She first achieved international recognition with the release of Zukhra, a video installation that recounts the history of Uzbekistan, which won a prize from the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. In 2014, she premiered her first feature film, 40 Days of Silence, at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it was nominated for best debut film. She then went on to make a number of short films while at the Norwegian Office for Contemporary Art and Le Fresnoy, a French contemporary arts studio.

Ismailova has worked to develop and promote Central Asian cinema, both in Uzbekistan and Europe. In 2019, she put together an educational program on contemporary art in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, where she also exhibited the film Q’org’on Chirog; and in 2021, she established the DAVRA collective, in order to research and publicise Central Asian culture. Her other exhibitions in this period have included Her Five Lives (2021), Chillahona (2022) and 18,000 Worlds (2022).