Tashkent, 1897. The cinema art in Uzbekistan has been loved since the evening when the screen first lit up and a magical vision appeared on the stretched canvas. Uzbekistan is the birthplace of cinema in Central Asia.
It was there, in the cities of Bukhara and Tashkent the first silent films were made in the mid-1920s. They laid the foundations not only for the national cinematography of Uzbekistan, but also became a kind of example that gave impetus to the formation of national cinematography in the entire region. Due to its historical mission as a crossroads of cultural interaction between East and West and a region with a developed urban structure, Uzbekistan naturally became the birthplace of cinema in Central Asia.
The evidence is the following historical facts, archival documents and film and photo materials reflecting the history of the formation of the cinema of Uzbekistan:
- On October 30, 1897, the first film show took place in Tashkent.
- In 1908, the first Uzbek cameraman Khudaibergen Devanov began shooting his own independent film plots. In the same year, the first film and photo laboratory in all of Central Asia was opened in Khiva.
- In 1924, the first in Central Asia film partnership “Bukhkino” was organized and in 1925, the first silent fiction film in Central Asia “The Minaret of Death” was released.
- In 1925 in Tashkent, the first Central Asian film factory “Sharq Yulduzi” was opened in the building of the Ishan-Kuli Madrasah.
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The cinema of Uzbekistan has become the favorite art form of the Uzbek people for almost a century of development due to the expression, meta-phoric narrative and imaginative power. Unlike such types of European art as symphonic music, ballet and opera introduced into the local cultural environment in the early 20th century, cinema has become a truly massive form of national performing arts.