Saodat Ismailova’s films unspool the landscapes and traditions of post-Soviet Central Asia, in particular her homeland of Uzbekistan. Weaving a rich tapestry of ritual, folklore, and a timeless atmosphere that envelops her predominantly female protagonists, Ismailova’s cinematography is slow and meditative, employing long, dreamy takes. The daughter of a cinematographer, she graduated in filmmaking in Uzbekistan, then moved to Treviso and Berlin, respectively, for residencies with the research center Fabrica in Treviso and the DAAD program in Berlin. Her documentary and fiction films have won awards at major film festivals and international exhibitions. In 2021, she set up DAVRA, a film collective dedicated to documenting Central Asian cinematic heritage.

Sufi traditions suffuse Uzbeki life, among them the belief that our world is one of 18,000 that comprise the universe. Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi, the twelfth-century mystic and founder of Illuminationism, a school of Islamic philosophy, proposes that reality is structured not by existence, but by these worlds, featuring varying intensities of divine light and darkness. Ismailova’s film 18,000 Worlds (2023) casts light as a main protagonist. It glances off futuristic atomic-era monuments and burnishes tiled turquoise domes and piles of stones, glowing red in the golden hour. It appears as a shy moon, as resplendent sunrises and sunsets, as a lime-green aurora, and streams in from a cave ceiling. There are people, too: wizened and smiling, weaving silk, or plucked out of the annals of Soviet military history and Western anthropology through archival black-and-white footage. As the camera meditatively pans across steppes and cities alike, interspersed with sequences of flashing images, a manifold and refracted sense of time and place slowly emerges. Afterimages from several alternate temporalities dance like sunspots.

At various points in the film, a woman in a sunny studio sifts through hand-drawn maps and excavation photographs, then carefully brushes caked dirt off an unidentified surface—an archaeologist or maybe a conservationist. Ismailova engages in a similar autoethnographic process in this work, which incorporates unused fragments from her own shoots alongside historical material from the Eye Filmmuseum. 18,000 Worlds suggests that a world is a multitude of realities; perhaps a single reality can also inhabit thousands of worlds.