In her delicately handled, insightful, loving and highly moving debut film (the first Kazakh documentary feature ever to be screened at the Berlinale), director Kristina Mikhailova slowly travels down the Aksay River, sitting down with young women to reflect on their powerful, vulnerable, terrible, hopeful lives within the Kazakh patriarchy.
Traveling along Kazakhstan’s Aksay River, director Kristina Mikhailova put up posters looking for young women who felt a river inside. That was all. Everyone who appeared for casting was interviewed, starting with one simple question: “What kind of river are you?” From there, Mikhailova improvised.
She talked to more than a hundred young Kazakh women, Mikhailova explained during the Q&A after the film’s world premiere at the Berlinale. Of those, fifteen ended up in the final film, River Dreams. And of those, five joined her on stage at the Zoo Palast cinema, all wearing glorious, colourful outfits. “As you can see, they are all very different,” Mikhailova smiled as she introduced them.
It isn’t particularly uncommon for a documentary’s subject to accompany the film team and to even be available for interviews. I don’t think, however, I have ever seen them mentioned so prominently in the press notes: each with their own photo, bio and dates of availability. It highlights the film’s cooperative nature, treating the interviewees not just as subjects, but as co-creators. And fits the underlying theme of the documentary: the importance and strength of the Sisterhood in times of Patriarchy.
All five women on stage are artists, according to their bios, which isn’t that surprising given that Mikhailova describes herself as an artist as well (and took part in a collective video art exhibition for the Uzbekistan National Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale) and probably connected with them through the local art scene.
The fact that Mikhailova, as per the press notes, contrasts the terms ‘artist’ and ‘documentary director’, preferring the former, irks me a little – because similar things are often said by people who don’t consider documentary cinema to be a true form of art – but I do understand her point. The film has an exceptional sense of aesthetic which I suspect some reviews may, unfortunately, overlook in favour of the documentary’s attention-grabbing content: the engaging, funny, heart-wrenching and moving stories of these young women, and the wider political context they touch upon.
Mikhailova interviews the women in locations near the river, within static widescreen compositions with depth and layers, or in front of highly textured backgrounds like a rock wall or an enormous tree. There is always something beautiful to look at, for the eye to wander over, aside from the interviewees themselves. Sometimes she adds coloured smoke and gentle music to scenes, enhancing their dreamlike quality, while widescreen close-ups of burning ashes or (possibly toxic) foam on the river transform such environmental aspects into oneiric textures – “dreams” forming one of the recurring topics of conversation. There is a restrained playfulness to these scenes, giving the film itself a steady, unstoppable flow.
Mikhailova films both nature and industry along the 130-kilometre-long riverscape with a similar eye for aesthetics, exclaiming “What a beautiful colour!” when she sees a blue excavator. Whether it’s plastic bottles bobbing in the stream or a tree spreading its branches majestically, there’s never any sense of judgment – visually it’s all part of the same landscape. “Some people love things because they’re beautiful,” her voice-over says, “I find this beautiful because I love it.”
She rests the same loving eyes on the young women. She talked with each of them for a couple of hours, creating an atmosphere of genuine trust, and the intimacy of women talking to another woman – of Sisterhood. There is music in the film, but more often it is the sound of the river that provides the background score. Together, these elements create something almost paradisical, a place of infinite safety. It is something Mikhailova has called both “radical tenderness” and “radical vulnerability”, while she is consciously “using sincerity as a tool”, because “sincerity disarms”.
This radical vulnerability allows the women to tell her, the camera, and, by extension, us, about their true selves. What kind of river are they? A small, invisible one, answers one young woman; a calm one, one day reaching the ocean, says another, before tearing up; a twilight river, says a third, with a wry smile. With what kind of dreams? To leave this country, to stand up to their father, to escape sexual violence.
There are lovely moments in the Kazakh, Russian, and Chechen spoken River Dreams, funny moments, and completely endearing characters. But it’s hard not to feel weighed down by their recollections of the pain, fear and damage a toxic patriarchy has imposed on them – these women themselves are perfectly aware that this isn’t just about the individual men that harmed them personally. “I don’t blame him”, says one woman of one such aggressor. “But I can’t condone his actions either.”
Neither can I, but we will never change anything, really, unless we change the system. It’s the Patriarchy, stupid! And the strongest force fighting it today is without any doubt – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the Sisterhood, so beautifully, powerfully on display in this film and on stage at the Zoo Palast. Because streams add up to rivers, rivers come together to form mightier rivers, and mighty rivers end up forming an ocean. And nothing on earth is stronger than the ocean.
Which makes the imagery of a flooded countryside, roofs peaking out of an endless brown sea, almost into a metaphor for the ultimate triumph of female power over toxic masculinity: the free-flowing rivers inevitably conquering the hard, immobile structures of the patriarchal societal order.
Of course, it was a real flood that hit Kazakhstan. The filming lasted five years, explained Mikhailova during the Q&A. She never set out to make a political film (apart from its proudly feminist and cooperative perspective), but because it took so long to acquire any kind of financing – which did mean that, in the meantime, they had more or less complete freedom to do whatever they wanted – it also took a long time to complete the film. Meanwhile, things happened. Which is why the first ever feminist march in the city of Almaty (after which the authorities got scared and banned any further ones, Mikhailova explained) and the horrible murder of Saltanat Nukenova by her ex-minister husband on CCTV, also ended up in the documentary.
However, the documentary’s clever construction always keeps the women’s stories centre stage. The poetics of their storytelling absorb the politics of news bulletins. The women’s stories are not illustrating national politics, these news events are illustrating their daily lives.
Which is as it should be. The Sisterhood comes first. And fuck the Patriarchy.
Kazakhstan/Switzerland/United Kingdom, 2026, 98 minutes
Director Kristina Mikhailova
Production 24 FPS
Producers Dana Sabitova
International sales Cinephil
Script Kristina Mikhailova
Cinematography Amir Zarubekov
Editing Arya Rothe, Kristina Mikhailova
Sound design Alexandr Khimich
With Alexandra Cherezova, Dana Ageleuova, Mira Ungarova, Aiya Kuzenbayeva, Juliya Jenis, Kristina Mikhailova, Dariya Temirhan, Tamara Yelantseva, Yakha Alieva, Akzel Beisembay, Inzhu Abeu, Gulnaz Moldakhmet, Sandugash Manapova
