Kristina Mikhailova follows the Aksay River in southern Kazakhstan and asks the women and girls living along its banks to imagine themselves as the river. Village girls and city dwellers, LGBTQ+ activists and a gender-conformist headmistress, women in prison and students dreaming of emigration; they speak of their desires and utopias against a backdrop of gender conservatism. Their conversations circle toxic masculinity, sexual assault, and the widely reported trial of a former minister who brutally murdered his wife, Saltanat Nukenova.
The resulting panorama of female life plans coalesces into poetry through the river's guiding presence; fluid, enduring, impossible to contain. With radical tenderness, Mikhailova's camera offers space for introspection, sisterhood and solidarity rather than imposition.