Ambiguous images of Soviet-Kyrgyz mountainscapes in The Sky of Our Childhood (1966)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Mountains play dominant and strategic roles in Kyrgyz cinema. They serve as an important mediator in the constructed antagonism between ‘national’ and ‘socialist’ evoked by media representations and, further, in the conventional associations between ‘nature’ and ‘national’, on the one hand, and ‘progress’ and ‘Soviet’, on the other. This article explores how mountainscapes constitute and interweave ‘Sovietness’ and ‘Kyrgyzness’ with reference to the 1966 film The Sky of Our Childhood (Nebo nashego detstva, 1966), directed by Tolomush Okeyev. The mountainscape serves not as a mere backdrop to the narrative but expresses ambiguities as a result of its transformative power.