Cinema
Tajikistan's film industry dates from 1929. The first official movie studio, called Tajikkino (later renamed to Tajikfilm), began operation in 1930. In 1935, Tajikkino started producing movies with voice-over. Some experts believe 1970-80 to be the golden age for Tajikfilm. Subsidized by the government, the studio was able to produce about six feature films each year. Examples of Tajikfilm's success during the Soviet times are such movies as The Legend of Rustam, The Legend of Rustam and Siavoush, and The Legend of the Smith Kova, based on stories from Ferdowsi's Shahnameh; First Morning of Adolescence (Юнности Первое Утро), which tells the life story of people living in Badakhshan in the beginning of the Soviet Empire, when its army was still struggling with the Basmachi movement; a trilogy New tales from Shaherizada, based on Arabic tales One Thousand and One Nights.
Among prominent Tajik producers are Valeriy Ahadov and Davlat Khudoynazarov.
After the breakdown of Soviet Union and the civil war in Tajikistan (1992–1997), Tajik cinema went downwards. The studio mainly survived by taking small foreign orders, and produced only a few of its own movies. Mohsen Makhmalbaf's film Sex & Philosophy from 2005 was set and produced in Tajikistan, as was the film Angel on the Right by Jamshed Usmonov from 2002. Other Tajik movies produced in the past two decades include: Kosh ba Kosh (1993), Business trip (1998, documentary), and Luna Papa (1999, a joint project of Tajikfilm with some counterparts from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Japan, and Russia).
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Tajikistan
Famous quotes containing the word cinema:
“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)
“Compare ... the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)