Despite the restoration of Soviet power in the area, Basmachis continue to arrive from across the border, bringing death and destruction to peaceful villages. One of the bands of rebels is led by Khairulla who is pitted against the militsiya (local militia) leader Maxumov. At first it seems...
The setting is Central Asia during the Russian civil war. In the post-revolutionary twenties, when the power in European Russia was (officially) "fully in the hands of the workers and peasants", but the fight against the Basmachi rebels was in full swing. When a Red Army detachment captures Sultan...
A dying woman’s wish sends her son on a train journey from the steppes of Uzbekistan to the Russian hinterland in search of his father’s grave. Just as the traveler’s home city of Samarkand is situated on the border between East and West, Khamraev balances his film on the edge of two...
A Bolshevik army officer and Uzbek who has been nursed back to health by a young Uzbek woman to whom he is now married, gains responsibility for the local village in 1929. He is urged by comrades in Tashkent to have the local women drop their chadors and veils but he is also told that he should not...
