RIVER DREAMS, first Kazakh Documentary in the Berlinale, awarded by the Ecumenical Jury
Mikhailova brought River Dreams to life and to Berlinale’s Forum section and captivated the Jury Members of the Forum: Stephen Brown, Ingrid Stapf, Lea Wohl von Haselberg.
‘River Dreams’, the debut feature by director Kristina Mikhailova, who gives voice to women imagining life beyond male dominance.
In Kazakhstan no river meets the ocean, but Kristina Mikhailova’s film floods the land with River girls.
Synopsis:Armed with radical tenderness, I am diving into the emotional landscape of Kazakhstan through the voices of women along the river. Me, Kazakhstan, and the River girls all just hit 30, that brutal age when you realize no one is coming to save you.
My River girls reveal the scars of being a woman and what it means to resist constant oppression in my homeland. So close your eyes. Drown in river dreams.
The project was developed in EURODOC 2023.
River Dreams is produced by 24 FPS (Kazakhstan) in co-production with Mira Film Basel (Switzerland) and Sylph Productions (United Kingdom) and was supported by Fachausschuss Film und Medienkunst Basel-
Stadt und Basel-Landschaft, Succès Passage Antenne, SRG SSR and Docs up Fund
Kristina Mikhailova
Kristina Mikhailova is an award-winning director and producer from Kazakhstan. Being the one of rare representatives of Kazakhstan everywhere in the international documentary industry, she made a quite successful jump-up with her debut feature film project "River Dreams" by attending Berlinale Talents, IDFAcademy, Eurodoc, DOK Leipzig Co-Pro Market, When East Meet West, CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator, etc. Despite many challenges as an independent filmmaker, she firmly engages in her ambitious desire to push the local documentary industry, which is completely underdeveloped. Her dream is to break the cinema form's stagnation in Kazakhstan and legitimize the diversity of documentary genres such as hybrid, documentary animation, creative documentary, etc.
Pursuing these goals, she also works on and co-founded the first non-bureaucratic grassroots initiative in the film industry of Kazakhstan - Association of Documentary Filmmakers - to make unique Kazakh voices finally heard. Her personal motivation is to include people in the Kazakh community for whom documentary format could become an important tool to speak out. She actively engaged in attracting civil society activists, researchers, scientists, contemporary artists, journalists to the doc scene, inviting them to create documentaries in their professional fields. Keeping this in mind, Kristina as producer has started working on feature documentaries with her Algiz film production company.
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