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Dream:

On this page, I will write weekly and eventually daily updates about the status of this project and its members. Eugenio, Ray, William, Callum, and myself had the dream of travelling to Uzbekistan back in September when we were unable to explain why this destination attracted us.

The crossroads that Uzbekistan has been for millennia along the Silk Road provides a fascinating but severely under-researched setting for exploration. Uzbekistan has ruled empires of its own, like the 19th-century Emirate of Bukhara, and has given birth to its own ruling families, like the mighty Mughals, but it has also been at the fulcrum of a Central Asian chess game for centuries, played between great powers. The ancient Sogdians spoke Tajik, a language related to Persian, but were increasingly replaced by a Turkic-speaking people who migrated along the steppes of Central Asia. Uzbek, a Karluk Turkic language related to Uyghur, is most widespread. Still, Tajik remains a widely spoken language in the historic cities of Samarkand and Bukhara. In contrast, the Kipchak Turkic language of Karakalpak, related to Kazakh, is spoken in the western province of Karakalpakstan, and an Oghuz Turkic dialect related to Turkmen is spoken in the adjacent Khorezm region. The fact that Russian is a lingua-franca among older generations is a result of decades of Russian occupation, where after the defeat of the Emir of Bukhara in 1920, the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic became a peripheral republic of the Soviet Union. Today, Chinese influence has been growing in the region through the Belt and Road initiative, but ties to Turkey remain strong through the Organization of Turkic States of which Uzbekistan is now a member. Uzbekistan is a nation that has been shaped and influenced by virtually all directions.

Reality:

Today, the dream of witnessing this great crossroads – the centre of Eurasia – for ourselves has grown simultaneously into a documentary film project directed by Ray, a research project which we hope to publish, and many short video essays and articles that we will conceive along the way.

Recently, Uzbekistan has experienced rapid and dynamic change. The privatization that followed the fall of the Soviet Union was a delayed phenomenon when compared to Eastern Europe, but under a new president, Uzbekistan is aiming for economic revitalization. At what costs? Has privatization achieved its goals and targets? With an incredibly young population, the Uzbekistan of today is very different from the Soviet republic that it was a few decades ago. How is privatization affecting education and youth outlook? With support for private schools, is there a growing inequality between underfunded public and emerging private institutions? For the first time in the great Uzbek chess game, English is becoming a lingua-franca, and Western influence is peeking in through the educational models that private institutions entertain. The youth of Uzbekistan represent the perspectives that we want to capture. These are the voices that we want to amplify in an arena where insightful research has proven difficult to find. In the midst of the crossroads, there is a distinctly Uzbek identity, and we want to find it. With the help of our Uzbek friends Diyorbek and Ulugbek, our goal is to capture the Aral Seas of this world onto film and the Bukharians of it into ink.

For a society whose greatest fallacies rest in indifference and ignorance, if we can only understand 1% of what this country is by the end of this project, we have been successful! Stay tuned!

Signed,

Botond Horvath, Ray Wu, Eugenio Ciarlandini, Will White, Callum Rand, and Bob Liu