All the Dreams We Dream
Hand-drawn animation
21 minutes, 2020
The hand-drawn animation film has derived from my research into the (non-) memory of the Kazakh famine, 1930 - 1933. Caused by the Soviet policies of collectivisation, the famine was an event of such extremity that it shattered the very foundations of Kazakh nomadic society, making it easier to Sovietise the region.
I began by drawing by hand, responding to memoirs of survivors, through which process I came to make a 21-minute long film. The film is structured like a non-linear oneiric narrative. It reworks two memoirs by Kazakh writers Gafu Kairbekov and Gabit Musrepov on their encounters with famine victims. It explores limits of empathy and resonances of fear, asking how we remember the catastrophic event and those who perished. What remains in the collective memory when evidence is erased and stories are silenced?
Throughout the film, the focus remains on the subtle boundary between animal and human and between human and non-human. As it explores the relationship between image, sound and text, it aims to construct a counter-narrative or a space for resistance to the dominant ideological narratives of the Soviet cultural production it references.
The film was screened at:
Medium and Memory exhibition curated by Griselda Pollock
documenta 15 DAVRA collective's public programme
Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival
goEast Film Festival, Weisbaden
Eye Film Player - Eye Filmmuseum
...In her hand-drawn animated film All the Dreams We Dream (2017-2020), the artist draws on childhood memories of travelling through the famine-ridden steppes that she has discovered in rare memoirs referencing the famine. Making drawings from their words exposes the artist herself to the traumatic horror she is bringing into visibility. Evocatively animated, the film takes us too on a journey over the deserted steppes in snowy moonlight, entering emptied yurts to encounter shocking, almost indecipherable chimeras created by starvation, clothed now in the compassion of her aesthetic wit(h)nessing.
Griselda Pollock, Medium and Memory, 2023
Selected drawings made for the film, charcoal on paper, 2017 - 2020