The Pamir Kirghiz are a tribe of some 2,000 people from the Pamir region of Central Asia. For the last 27 years they have lived in exile in Eastern Turkey. In 2005 an Anglo-Turkish film crew arrives in their village to work with the tribe to tell their story. In a series of scenes divided into "chapters", we see revealing interviews with the Kirghiz, see exciting and entertaining reconstructions shot on film in a variety of different cinematic styles, and comic scenes of the interaction between the film crew and the community. During this process, we learn how the Pamir Kirghiz' antipathy to Communism drove them from Soviet Russia, then later from Maoist China, and finally from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to their current exile. And as the past is explored in interview and reconstruction, we see how the Pamir Kirghiz live today in modern Turkey. The film is part historical document, part ethnographical description of a unique people, part portrait of the conflict between individual and globalised culture, and part comedy about the process of film-making.
37 Uses for a Dead Sheep
To preserve their culture, the Pamir Kirghiz people have migrated across Central Asia from the U.S.S.R to China to Afghanistan to Pakistan and finally to remote eastern Turkey, but now they face the most serious threat to their traditions,...
