AMN x QYZQARAS – Tremors Beneath the Surface: Women’s Voice From Central Asia

2025-10-26 22:30

Sunday, October 26th

• Start:20:30
• Entry:€ 5

Tremors Beneath the Surface: Women’s Voices from Central Asia

Asian Movie Night is happy to come to ACU with a program curated by Malika Mukhamejan (Qyzqaras Film Festival)! Join us from 19:00 for a dinner with Barricades and a special sweet treat from Kazakhstan! The film screening will begin around 20:30.

Tremors Beneath the Surface: Women’s Voices from Central Asia brings together features, shorts, and experimental works from Central Asia and its diasporas, assembling a layered portrait of women’s lives. The films are bound not by a single storyline but by the tremors that run beneath them: silence carried across generations, memory interrupting the present, endurance woven into the textures of the everyday.

At ACU we will present a short programme Part I — Unearthed Lives: Women at the Threshold 

Part I Unearthed Lives: Women at the Threshold (total: 79min)

This strand gathers narrative and documentary shorts where women confront turning points that expose the quiet labor of survival. Whether mourning a parent, keeping a theatre alive against collapse, or facing abandonment in moments of political turmoil, the protagonists reveal how silence is inherited yet unsettled. These films move between rural and urban spaces, between adolescence and adulthood, mapping an emotional geography of resilience at the edge of change

1. 1. 1. The Rock / Altynai Adamalieva / Kyrgyzstan / 2024 / 17’
         Working in livestock breeding is much harder when the farmer is a fragile and delicate woman. What feelings does she experience? Does she want to change her life?
         Has this become a heavy burden for her? Only she knows her most intimate, unspoken secrets.
      2. Alone in a Dance for Two/ Mehrangez Saidmamadova/ Tajikistan/ 11′
         A former labour migrant RANO (36), turned an ambitious director of a provincial Russian drama theatre in a small Tajik town, attempting to make the theatre function, despite challenges by the management.
      3. Joqtau / Aibota Kali / Kazakhstan / 2023 / 15’
         After her father’s sudden death, a 15-year-old Aisha is unable to cry and becomes the target of her mocking neighbor, forcing her to confront her numbness and find a way to release her grief.
      4. The Late Wind / Shugyla Serzhan / Kazakhstan / 2023 / 22’
         A young Kazakh woman discovers she is pregnant and is preparing for the event she knows will change her life. Then her world turns upside down when her boyfriend suddenly disappears, leaving her alone and uncertain about her future as a mother. She searches for him desperately while the city around her is also fracturing into chaos with protests erupting everywhere around her. Perhaps she can’t do anything but wait for her partner’s return, hoping for a brighter future.

Find the full programme with more screenings and more films at various locations around the Netherlands here

Malika Mukhamejan is a curator and filmmaker whose work elevates diverse voices in Central Asian cinema, exploring women’s representation, and fostering community through film. She is the founder of Qyzqaras (@qyzqaras), an Almaty-based film festival dedicated to female filmmaking, which has just celebrated its most recent edition: Qyzqaras Film Festival 2025.

QYZQARAS is an independent platform and annual film festival based in Almaty, Kazakhstan, dedicated to amplifying women’s voices in cinema, with a particular focus on Central Asia. Founded in 2023, QYZQARAS aims to challenge dominant narratives, support emerging filmmakers, and provide space for underrepresented perspectives through film screenings, discussions, and educational initiatives. Its motto — “women’s perspectives through the lens of cinema” — reflects its commitment to feminist curatorial practices and the creation of a transnational community of artists, thinkers, and audiences.

Asian Movie Night (AMN) is a diasporic film platform in the Netherlands. Established as a direct response to the systematic lack of Asian representation in the Dutch cultural scene, AMN brings in radically different narratives and aesthetics to a broad audience through collaboration with various cultural venues. With an interdisciplinary approach that integrates film, visual art, design, and conversations, AMN aims to challenge the notion of ‘Asianness’ by transcending nation-state borders and resisting fixed identities.