International Competition

Aralkum, the Aral Desert, is the bare seabed, the last thing left of the Aral Sea. It powerfully reveals the deadly impact of human activities - in this case, the intensive cultivation of cotton - on an ecosystem. The directors film the shore’s last inhabitants, who have lost their way of life to the desertification of their environment. The images of those bodies, of those spaces in which the vegetation struggles to resist the desert that was once water, then become images of a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the real place becomes a sort of melancholic border space, suspended between life and death. By weaving together different cinematic textures, Aralkum re-imagines the dried-up Aral Sea, allowing an old fisherman to set sail one last time.