Hannah Congdon and Catherine Haigh (Hannah & Cat, left and right above) refer to their feature doc debut as “a road movie with a twist.”
Back in 2018, they decided to drive the remote and potentially dangerous Pamir Highway in order to examine the lives of women their age in the Central Asian countries of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. When they created an Instagram page to advertise their intentions they were amazed by the response from women in the region, many of whom were keen to invite the filmmakers into their lives.
“It’s a very interesting part of the world that’s trapped between Russia to the north and Afghanistan to the south, and as a consequence there’s a real myriad of interesting complex issues affecting women,” explains Cat. “And we wanted to delve a bit deeper and felt that there was definitely more that we could uncover there. So then we did more research and we came across this road called the Pamir Highway, which is supposedly the second highest international road on earth. And we thought, hmm, it doesn’t look like many other women have driven this. Why don’t we give it a go?”
As they say in the film, “With women behind the wheel and women behind the camera, we’d be using our journey to meet other women along our route.”
And they do meet women en route, extraordinarily kind and generous women who are effecting remarkable change in their surroundings. Sometimes overtly, sometimes in small but significant increments. Such as the English-speaking school teacher Sayram in the village of Sidz, who also maintains the school, her household and a well-stocked vegetable garden in the absence of her husband who, like many men in the region, must go to Russia to find work. We also meet the beekeeper Dilbar who helps organise the female entrepreneurs in the market (they number 80% of stall holders) and who draws parallels between the importance of female bees in the hive and women in her society.
Cat and Hannah meet gynaecologist Gulina who seems to have brought the whole of the village of Murghab into the world, and they encounter medic Baktykan, one of the only women in the region to drive a car and who opposes against a patriarchal system that opposed her adoption of a niece whose mother, Baktykan’s sister, died while giving birth due to lack of blood and medical supplies.
But we also hear about the barbaric custom of bride kidnapping in the region, which is still condoned by older generations but vehemently opposed by women’s rights activist Jamilya, as well the westernized Aiperi, who works as a hotel receptionist but whose sister was victim to the practice.
In the city of Samarkand, we are introduced to two astonishingly diverse stories, those of the zoo keeper Zuhro, whose love for animals seems to outstrip the affection she feels for her own children. She freely admits to having suckled infant lions and bears. Then we meet Sabina who, after raising a child and maintaining a household, became world taekwondo champion. “A feeling I can’t describe,” she says.
All the time Cat and Hannah are on the road. They drive along treacherous ridges, ascend to great heights (4655 metres), deal with punctures and poor combustion caused by the thin air, negotiate tricky borders, get surveilled by Uzbek secret services, take a short cut off the main road only to be faced by a raging river, and tell the histories of the region both through Soviet times and since the establishment of more Islamist regimes.
After they returned to the UK Cat and Hannah received, in March 2019, a John Brabourne Award for their film, a prize which recognises emerging UK talent in film and television. In July of the same year, the project was selected as the winner of the Edinburgh International Film Festival’s Work in Progress Pitch. London-based Dartmouth Films later came on board to produce.
The women reflect on the entire experience four years later, after the film’s world premiere at Edinburgh FF. “I think we had this idea that, ‘oh, we’re gonna go and speak to the coolest, most gung-ho women doing the most like radical stuff that we can find,’” comments Hannah. “And as we went along, we kind of realized that it is just as radical for a woman in a tiny community, which is extremely conservative, to put in just small incremental changes that only affect a few people as it is to [conduct] masturbation workshops in big cities.”
“We’ve learned a huge amount,” adds Cat of the process of getting the film to screen. “It has pretty much been a team of two. We’ve been the musical supervisor, the costume director, you know – it’s funny that the credits are far smaller than you see on other films. And I think it’s taught us a huge amount about filmmaking, the ins and outs, really having to do stuff from scratch…We have been a hundred percent involved in orchestrating the story of the film, working incredibly closely with our editor (Anna Zavialova) who’s been fantastic, making decisions about the emotional arc of the film and all of that stuff. So we’ve learned a huge amount from doing it.”
“And it’s quite strange looking back when we watch the film… we’re quite a lot older now, so you feel like you are watching this younger version of yourself,” Hannah adds. “And I certainly feel like if I went and filmed lots of this stuff again; yes, I could shoot it much better and I could maybe structure it better, and all of the things that I’ve learned since, but equally I don’t think we could ever recreate that film again, the same rawness, the same authenticity. I’m not sure it would be a better film if it was better shot. I think that is part of the naivety we set out with.”
The women were in their early 20’s when they undertook the odyssey. These days Hannah is a freelance assistant producer while Cat works in sales away from the film industry. But would they throw in their lot together again to make another doc?
“I think at some point we’d probably love to do something again,” Hannah responds. “I’ve made a few short films on my own and the experience of making something with a best friend is just like a zillion times better than doing something on your own. So we’d love to, but I think we both said we are not gonna go and make another feature documentary without having some funding in place first, because we both have full time jobs and it has been a real challenge.”
Cat believes that they have hit on a good formula that can be reworked in the future, that of two women in a car, using the road trip as a means to tell a more wider, more universal story. “I think it’s a concept that we could maybe take to other regions, that you could apply more broadly, but as Hannah said, it’s not really something to embark upon without the right amount of funding being in place – without the right amount of support.”
