Saodat Ismailova

Saodat Ismailova is an Uzbek film director and artist whose work focuses on the history of women in Central Asia. After graduating in film making from the Tashkent State Institute, she went to study at Fabrica, research and communication center in Italy. Since then she shares her time between Tashkent, Uzbekistan and Paris, France. She first achieved international recognition with the release of Zukhra, a video installation that recounts the history of Uzbekistan through a state of sleeping character, which won a prize from the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. In 2014, she premiered her first feature film, 40 Days of Silence, at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it was nominated for best debut film. She then went on to make a number of short films while at the Norwegian Office for Contemporary Art and Le Fresnoy, a French contemporary arts studio.