Nascent, destroyed, aspiring: three cinematic visions of Dushanbe

View of Dushanbe with the remaining Soviet architecture. 2019, Photo: Karolina Kluczewska.

In 2024, Tajikistan’s capital Dushanbe celebrates its 100th anniversary. Within its lifespan, the city changed beyond recognition three times.

The first was the communist transformation. In 1924, when Dushanbe was declared the capital of the Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, it was a small village with clay buildings, inhabited by 5,000 people. At the time of Tajikistan’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Dushanbe was an industrial centre and a fully functioning Soviet city with 600,000 inhabitants.

The second transformation occurred during the Tajik Civil War, which lasted from 1992 to 1997. Amidst the ongoing fighting, the city quickly decayed. The Russian minority and Tajik upper middle class fled the capital, moving to Russia, whereas the rural population moved in.

The third transformation started in the mid-2000s, when a Dubai-inspired reconstruction of the city started. Since then, there has been an ongoing process of demolishing Soviet-era buildings and replacing them with high-rises. This has become emblematic of the country’s capitalist transformation. Today, Dushanbe is a city of skyscrapers, with a population of 1.2 million.

This essay analyses how three popular films represent Dushanbe in these periods, focusing on artistic visions of the city and its inhabitants. The producers’ embeddedness in global networks of knowledge is fundamental to understanding the films’ take on the interplay between the city infrastructure and gender, ethnicity, language and class.

A nascent city

“The White Grand”, or “Beliy royal” in the original Russian, offers a humorous perspective on Dushanbe that was still in the making in the 1960s.

This 1968 musical comedy was a local Soviet product, rather than a “pure” Soviet one. Released by Tajikfilm, Soviet Tajikistan’s cinema company, it was one of the first works of the Dushanbe-born director and actor Mukadas Makhmudov (1926-1991). He worked at the Tajik Academic Drama Theatre named after Lohuti and graduated from two famous Moscow institutions, the Moscow Conservatory and the VGIK film school. The screenplay was written by a prominent local Russian-speaking novelist called Timur Zulfikarov (born 1936), who grew up in a mixed Tajik-Russian family.

“The White Grand” is deprived of the orientalizing gaze cast on the local population that often characterized Soviet cultural products about Central Asia. On the contrary, Tajik and Soviet value systems and lifestyles are not shown in a juxtaposition, with the first presented as backward and the second as modern, but are mixed in unexpected ways. They skilfully coexist, complement and at times mock each other.

The plot starts with Alla Sergeevna, a museum employee from Moscow, arriving in Dushanbe in the mid-1960s in search of a mythical French white piano from the 19th century. The instrument belonged to the last Emir of Bukhara, who supposedly obtained it as a gift from the last Russian tsar and intended to present it to his French wife. But the Bolshevik Revolution put an end to the Emirate of Bukhara and, as a result, the piano was lost. According to rumours, the piano was now located somewhere near Dushanbe. The plot centres on Alla’s adventures in Dushanbe, which at that time was still coming into existence, both in terms of infrastructure and its social composition.

Still from “The White Grand”, Alla arrives in Dushanbe

“The White Grand” is a humorous ode to nascent Dushanbe. Located in a valley encircled by mountains covered with snow, Dushanbe is no longer a village but not yet a proper city. There is an airport but no proper public transport, and so after arriving in Dushanbe by plane, Alla takes a lift to the city centre on a horse cart. There is a hotel, but it is locked because there are no visitors. As Alla walks through the city centre, she sees squares with fountains and flowers, and large and clean boulevards shaded by chinars, eastern plane trees that became the symbol of Soviet Dushanbe. Buses, trucks transporting cement for construction, horse carts and lost goats pass each other on roads. The film shows a growing, buzzing city whose territory keeps expanding as apartment buildings are being raised in the middle of nowhere and people are moving in from villages.

Just like the city infrastructure, the city inhabitants come together. Different ethnicities (Tajiks, Russians), social classes (intelligentsia, workers, people relocating from villages), values (liberal and conservative) and qualities of life (urban and rural) struggle to get along in the same apartment buildings – forming the identity of the Dushanbegi, the residents of Dushanbe. Since the entire film is in Russian, linguistic differences, dialects and accents are not visible, but they were part of this process. The Soviet stereotypes about Tajiks are mocked and turned around. For instance, women with headscarves are not shown as passive victims of patriarchy. Instead, they can fiercely argue with male sellers at bazaars about prices and enjoy classical piano music. Women in harems make fun of their husband-owner and dance rock’n’roll. Everyone has agency and is a bit crazy.

Alla is the only Muscovite in the film and, arguably, an allegory of the Soviet centre. She is stylish, a bit stiff and opens her eyes wide in disbelief as she observes the chaotic processes of Dushanbe coming together. But she does not demonstrate any superiority towards the locals. She connects with a local composer named Ahmedov, the young pianist Shodi and the singer Lola as equals thanks to their shared love for music, and gradually falls in love with the city. When she eventually leaves Dushanbe, she is wearing a Tajik dress and crying. “Only Dushanbe”, as the famous song from the film goes, “I will keep you in my heart forever.” The city changed Alla, not the other way round.

In “The White Grand”, Sovietness is made local. The film is deprived of a civilizational pathos about turning Tajiks into Soviet subjects. Rather, Tajiks domesticate Sovietness in their own way.

A destroyed city

“Kosh ba kosh”, or “Odd and Even” in English, shows Dushanbe in the early 1990s – in a time of rapid changes due to the Soviet collapse, independence and the civil war.

This war romance was written and directed by Bakhtiyor Khudoynazarov (1965-2015), a Dushanbe-born director who, like the creator of “The White Grand”, worked in the Tajikfilm film studio and graduated from the VGIK film school in Moscow. “Kosh ba kosh” was one of Tajikistan’s first international movies: it was produced by the German company Pandora Film and co-financed by Russia, Germany, Switzerland and Japan. The film was awarded a Silver Lion prize for best director at the Venice Film Festival in 1993.

Shooting was accompanied by constant gunfire, which in the film can be heard in the background. Albeit marked by the war, these were the only times when Tajik cinema enjoyed unprecedented freedom: it was not anymore subject to Soviet ideology, and not yet subordinated to nationalist nation-building.

The film starts with a free-spirited young Tajik woman, Mira, returning from Russia to her hometown Dushanbe. During her absence, the war had started and everything changed. She discovers that her father started gambling. After losing everything that he possessed, he even gambled her away to an old man, who now wants to claim his prize. Mira manages to escape with the help of a street-smart young man, Daler. Together, they go into hiding in Dushanbe’s Victory Park, where Daler works at a cable car base.

If “The White Grand” shows a nascent Soviet city, “Kosh ba kosh” depicts Dushanbe destroyed by fighting. There is nothing left from the developed Soviet city that Dushanbe used to be on the eve of independence. The factories were plundered and fell into ruin, plaster keeps falling from apartment buildings, and there is broken window glass everywhere. Tanks patrol the streets and gunfire is omnipresent. The infrastructure is used in unforeseen ways. The cable car that Daler operates was once a leisure time attraction for city inhabitants. Now, it is used to transfer straw for heating and smuggle beer, and at times is rented for extramarital affairs. The cable car base hosts refugees who came to Dushanbe from rural areas most affected by fighting.

Still from “Kosh ba kosh”, refugees in Dushanbe

The city undergoes a major social transformation, too. Social rules have been suspended, violence and deception are widespread. To kill time, men gamble on a riverbank, while corpses of killed people float in the water. People displaced from the countryside arrive in the city, whereas ethnic Russians and the Tajik intelligentsia are leaving en masse. For them, going to Russia is the only way to stay alive and maintain their liberal lifestyles. In “Kosh ba kosh”, the Russian-speaking urban middle classes, who lived modestly but comfortably in Soviet Dushanbe, are not able to adapt to the new reality. Like Mira’s father, they have a piano and books at home, but no skills to survive in times of war. Dushanbe is now gender-divided and it is a man’s world: young women like Mira cannot anymore move around the city without the protection of men, otherwise risking being abducted. It is people like Daler, a street-smart man and a bit of a hooligan, who can best find their way around a war-torn city. Thanks to his seemingly unsophisticated job as a cable car operator, he can make informal money and put food on the table.

Although “Kosh ba kosh” depicts the horrors of the war, it advances a surprising message about the society. It shows that the massive divide between Tajikistan’s urban and rural population can be overcome – despite nearly irreconcilable differences in their value systems, education and languages. The war equalized people in their misery. Russian-speaking, free-spirited women like Mira and Tajik-speaking, veiled female refugees from the countryside can coexist and support each other at the cable car base, without looking down at each other.

An aspiring city

“Modern Bride”, or “Arusi zamonavi” in the original Tajik, offers a glimpse at Tajikistan’s capitalist transformation, when its effects on Dushanbe’s outlook and inhabitants started becoming visible a decade ago.

This popular comedy from 2015 largely draws on an Uzbek film titled “Kelgindi kelin” from 2006, which was adapted to the conditions of contemporary Tajikistan. “Modern Bride” was the first movie of Nabijon Pirmatov (born 1989), a lawyer and self-taught film director, and it marked the beginning of his career in the film industry. It was produced by TajDreams and JM Production, two among many private entertainment companies which in recent years became big players in Tajik show business and rivals of the state production company Tajikfilm.

The plot centres on a narcissistic medicine student from an ultra-rich, Russian-speaking family, Sabrina, who falls in love with a modest engineering student from the countryside, Rustam. They first meet when she leaves her Lexus car at a car repair shop where Rustam works as a mechanic to finance his studies. The two meet in Dushanbe several times, and on each occasion the structural inequality between them is clear. When Rustam suddenly returns to the countryside, Sabrina follows him and tries to adapt to village life.

Still from “Modern Bride”, Rustam fixing Sabrina’s car

Certainly, “Modern Bride” was not meant as a social critique. It was envisaged as a light comedy but it accidentally encapsulated the spirit of its time, which is well visible in the background. If “Kosh ba kosh” shows Dushanbe destroyed by the war, “Modern Bride” captured the moment when the city’s mass scale transformation into a Dubai-inspired metropolis accelerated rapidly. The film also shows the many cities within the city: big mansions surrounded by tall fences, belonging to the new rich, like Sabrina’s family, and crowded dormitory rooms inhabited by those who desperately try to stay afloat, like Rustam. The first group owns Lexus cars (which a decade ago were locally considered a symbol of success), while the second drives old Opels imported from Germany, where they could not be used anymore because they failed environmental tests.

The film depicts the divides between the urban social strata in a grotesque way. The Soviet-era intelligentsia, whose demise was shown in “Kosh ba kosh”, is now absent from the picture. In “Modern Bride”, financial capital is central in determining people’s status and lifestyle. There are essentially two main groups: the rich and the poor. As a representative of the rich, Sabrina wears expensive, sexy clothes, diamond jewellery and has long nail tips. The poor, like Rustam and his friends from the dormitory room, try to seem rich, but their shirts, sunglasses and hand watches look cheap. Sabrina spends her free time in boutiques, restaurants and nightclubs. Meanwhile, Rustam combines his studies with several manual jobs. She is never shown studying, but we learn that after graduation her father will open for her a medical centre where she will be the manager. He is the best student in his year but does not have many career options. She acts freely and independently, while he takes care of his family back in the village.

There is a surprise to this otherwise predictable plot. It is the rich Sabrina who eventually adapts to the poor Rustam and adopts his lifestyle and values – not the other way round. In this way, “Modern Bride” says goodbye to the Soviet-era narrative about modernity which praised liberal values, juxtaposing them with Tajik conservatism that was portrayed as backward and had to be eradicated. In this regard, it is remarkable that Sabrina is the only person in the movie who speaks exclusively Russian (which symbolizes the liberal mindset). Following their first meeting at the car repair shop, Rustam asks his friend: “why does she speak Russian?” His friend tells him: “Just speak Russian to her”, to which Rustam replies: “she should learn the language. I will speak my mother tongue.” By the end of the film, Sabrina does her best to speak Tajik. What does this tell us? The new, Tajik modernity is about aspiring to wealth while maintaining the traditional lifestyle.

Despite being a comedy, in “Modern Bride” the prospects for social mobility for the poor living in contemporary Dushanbe are rather bleak. One way to significantly improve one’s life leads through love: Rustam has metaphorically won a lottery when he fell in love with a rich girl. Yes, Sabrina adapted to his traditional lifestyle but she also brought her money. Otherwise, to scale up in the social hierarchy one needs to literally win a lottery – just like Rustam’s best friend from the dormitory does. In “Modern Bride”, like in today’s Dushanbe, these are the main options.

The 100th anniversary

While your outlook keeps constantly changing, live a long and healthy life. Happy birthday, Dushanbe.

Karolina Kluczewska is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, and a research associate at the University of St Andrews

Please support New Eastern Europe's crowdfunding campaign. Donate by clicking on the button below.

Central Asia, Central Asian cinema, Culture, Dushanbe, Film, Post-soviet memory, Post-soviet transformation, Tajikistan