George Itzhak

Director’s Statement
Uzbekistan has been an enigma to me for most of my life - and a white spot on the map for much of the world. I was born there in 1992, in the capital city of Tashkent, to a Bukharian-Jewish family. In the early 1990s, the main thought occupying my family’s minds was moving to America. I grew up in Queens, New York, and have built up an image of Uzbekistan in my mind based on fragments of home videos, anecdotes, photos, and later, YouTube videos.   

Outside of my immediate family, the society I grew up in had no visual reference for what Uzbekistan was, what it smelled like, what it sounded like.  As I developed as a filmmaker, I often wondered - what if I could tell a visual story that reflected Uzbekistan’s past as well as its future? In doing so, I could be the one to provide that reference for others.

An outlet for this desire presented itself when I read stories in the Calvert Journal about electronic music in Uzbekistan, and a first-of-its-kind electronic festival taking place at the Aral Sea. These stories flung open a curtain for me, through which I could see an entirely different vision of Uzbekistan. This wasn’t a place simply stuck in the past of the Silk Road and the Iron Curtain. It was a living, breathing, dynamic place. A very young country, actively building its identity every day.

A few short months later, I traveled to Uzbekistan with my cinematographer and collaborator Neha Hirve, with the goal of telling the story of a burgeoning electronic music renaissance in the country. We began in Tashkent, where a party collective called Fragment has been uniting electronic music lovers for the past year, creating a unique space in the city. And then we traveled west, passing through the ancient city of Bukhara, until we found ourselves in Karakalpakstan - a region of the country with its own distinct language and culture. It’s a place that lives in the shadow of a massive environmental catastrophe: the disappearance of the Aral Sea (once the 4th largest lake in the world). It’s in this arid and unforgiving landscape, dotted by rotting shipwrecks, where the Stihia Festival is held. An electronic music festival never seen before in Uzbekistan. Electronic music took on an otherworldly power at Stihia. It was as if the festival was hoping to wake up the long-dead Aral with an explosion of sound. The festival stage became a temple, with throngs of people praying for water with their gyrating bodies. It sounds mystical - but it’s hard to deny the feeling in the air that night. A long-forgotten place was suddenly teeming with life and color and energy. Electronic music, with its grandeur and relentless repetition, became a metaphor for the unstoppable force of nature itself - something that the name of the festival, Stihia, directly references.