feed me fashion

I am currently staying in Tashkent to teach a class on street photography together with French photographer Cyril Robin, a joint project of the German and French embassies here. As I’d never been to Uzbekistan or any other Central Asian country before, I was beyond excited to come here and have been delighted ever since. This country fuses so many different influences – though the official language Uzbek is a Turkic language (related to Turkish, yes, but also Kazakh and Siberian dialects) everyone also speaks Russian, the food is a mixture of arabic, turkish and russian cuisine, as is the architecture, and Tashkent’s inhabitants descend from Uzbeks, Russians, Koreans, and Europeans. While I spend most of the time with my more than lovely students, I luckily had a little time off yesterday to do some sight-seeing.

The first thing that surprised me was how lusciously green the inner center of Tashkent is, lots of parks, trees, and perfectly cut lawns line the wide streets, giving the city quite a natural feeling and somewhat tempering the already very hot temperatures around 36 degrees. Although water isn’t a good that’s abundant in Uzbekistan, the city’s government obviously decided it’s important to have a very green city center and most of these parks are artificially watered every day. Most of it is also only meant to be looked at instead of used, so unlike in Berlin you won’t see families having a picnic, let alone a barbecue, or someone having an afternoon nap in the shadow of a tree or even walking past a lawn.

As I mentioned, the streets here are wide, humongous, really. Now, I expected to see wide streets — they’re a common feature of Soviet city planning and were implemented here after a disastrous earthquake in 1966 — but although traffic in Tashkent is quite busy, the roads are never filled to capacity. The few drivers around are not really concerned about pedestrians’ safety, but as most streets are not jammed, I’ve not yet encountered any seriously dangerous situations. There seems to be no alternative to either option, as both biking and rental bikes have recently been forbidden (!?). Illegal biking in front of a typical new building, of which loads more are currently built. Still, getting around is fairly easy, even for tourists: if you don’t use the beautiful and well working metro (where photography is absolutely not allowed), you can just wait on the curb for someone to stop (mostly Daewoo Matiz drivers), name your goal and price (about 3000 Sum, or 1 Euro) and the driver will decide if he can or will take you. Everyone does it, groups of people, men and also single women, Uzbeks or even the German and French women working at the embassy. It’s completely normal. Not a Matiz but a Lada in front of the History Museum (former Lenin museum). The center of Tashkent is dominated by the giant Amir Timur Square with the Timur equestrian statue in the middle, circled by Hotel Uzbekistan (my hotel — four stars that must have been mainly awarded to the beautiful facade structure) and the Timur museum. Amir Timur, a 13th-century warrior, was installed as a kind of forefather of the Uzbek nation at the beginning of the 1990s to replace the Soviet symbols and historiography. What also disappeared in the 1990s were most of the big trees on the square, turning it into a unbearably hot, and thus deserted, spot in summer months with little shadow. Except the few obvious tourists, there’s no one around. Amir Timur Square

The Broadway Departing from Amir Timur Square is “Broadway”, a wide pedestrian street lined with parks and trees that used to be filled with small shops and cafés and which was crazily busy until those mostly illegal businesses were removed 10, 15 years ago and the area was (once again) turned into a lonely street with only few spots to stop left. It left me confused why a city’s government would decide to re-design and clean up the city’s center only to leave it deserted and empty.

The main attraction, though, is Independence Square, a giant area with several ministries as well as the senate, and several crazy monuments. Another gigantic fountain (the city is full of fountains), for instance, a huge arcade structure topped with silver birds as symbols of independence, or the giant golden globe showing a map of Uzbekistan that replaced the tallest statue of Lenin in the Soviet Union (30m tall). Although the ever-present water features and fountains cool things down a bit, the heat is seriously too much without any high trees providing shadow and thus we happily fled to the Anhor canal just beyond the square.

The canal is used for swimming and is also a preferred spot for dating for the young people of Tashkent, with girls in nice dresses and make-up and boys trying to impress them. In summer, when temperatures here reach over 40, sometimes even 50 degrees, the canal and its bridges are crowded with students seeking some cool relief.

We ended our tour with a typical Uzbek lunch by the canal. Now, Uzbek kitchen is mainly focussed on meat and meat only. You get it grilled, mostly as a shashlik (kebab), either minced or in bite-sized piece. A national dish is plov, a mixture of rice, vegetables, meat, and boiled egg. Also served are salads, most of them with mayonaise, but then the fresh cucumbers and tomatoes with herbs are so delicious, one can well live off those alone. They are as fresh and tasty as the local strawberries and cherries, bursting with flavor, so sweet and enjoyable. Coming up: Chorsu bazar and many pictures of cherries, strawberries, mulberries…

Mansfeld is a small town in Saxony-Anhalt near the Harz Mountains. It has approximately 9,600 inhabitants and apparently Martin Luther spent a big part of his childhood there. Mansfeld used to be a mining town and has 15 different districts. I researched all of this because, quite frankly, I was sure that Mansfeld didn’t exist. Not only had I never heard of it before, but after watching Mario Schneider’s documentary film, I was convinced that this place, its people, and rituals existed only in the fantasy of their children and were nothing but a beautiful fiction. Paul, Sebastian, and Tom are the little knights of this real-life fairy tale. They come from different backgrounds, different lives, and different families. Paul is big boy. He has a large family and watches life and death on the farm. His daddy is in the hospital and he has problems at school. Sebastian is a little dreamer and loves fighting with his little brother more than paying attention to his math homework. At school, the girls interrogate him thoroughly about which girls he likes and which he does not. Tom has two mommies, but he also has a daddy who comes to visit him regularly. Tom reads the newspaper, makes coffee, and is very alert. He is a pretty child, but he’s afraid of the dark. Tom is sure that the grown-ups have stopped playing because work and housework got in their way. It’s not easy being a child, but it’s also not easy to make a good film about the experience of being a child. When watching MansFeld, I was thrown back into my own childhood, not because the stories are necessarily similar to mine, but because the film captures the moments of growing up so delicately and sweetly and, therefore, universally. Director Mario Schneider, who -together with Florian Kirchler -is also responsible for the camerawork, has the open eyes of someone who doesn’t know yet how boring, stressful, and bleak being an adult can be.

All senses are alert: Peng! Peng! Peng! Peng! We hear the whips being lashed and we wonder what they will be used for. The sound of this weapon is more reliable than the sound of words for a kid like Paul – his Saxon accent fails him at school when he turns all the “t”s into “d”s and his mother threatens to cancel the holidays. Some cruelties are serious for a child, others become banal in the everyday routine. To exsanguinate and skin a rabbit is no biggie, when you’re used to it. The death squeal of a gigantic pig might me a little frightening, but less so for the children watching than for someone who has never witnessed a live butchering before. While the camera observes with great interest and even greater patience, the omniscient narrator is on holidays. I was almost waiting for the reassuring voice of an old man to tell me the story, but mind you, this fairy tale is real, despite all its enchantedness. As we become companions to our little princes on this journey back to childhood, we grown-ups get the chance to reconsider some of the politics we discuss wholeheartedly now that we think we are wiser. Can two women raise a child? Why don’t we ask little Tom, who looks like he couldn’t be happier with the attention he gets from mom, her girlfriend Steffi, and dad. Is it fair that in our goal-oriented society all children are treated as if they had the same educational and class background? When Paul fails at school, it doesn’t seem to be his fault so much, but in the end it’s him who’s suffering. These ideas are marginal notes in the film, but they expand the wonder of childhood towards the realities of being an adult. Some of those responsible for the magic of MansFeld are no less than Antonio Vivaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Igor Strawinsky, whose orchestrations add dramatic force and a hint of mystery to the tale of three boys and their town. They do it sparsely but effectively and, as much as I hate dominant music scores in documentary films, here, it couldn’t add more perfectly and magically to the real life drama. The grand finale of the film is the celebration of Whitsuntide (Pfingsten) where all of Mansfeld turns into a whimsical spectacle of costume and ancient ritual. You finally discover the symbolic function of the whip, and gape with open mouth and wide eyes at the ethnographically documented festivities that involve colourful disguises, fancifully decorated vehicles, and lots of mud. By this point in the film, you wonder if what you see is real or not. The fairy tale of childhood closes with a group of kids looking into the camera like the passers-by from the 1926 archive footage of the town’s people. Like childhood itself, you wish that this fascinating and utterly charming little film about the little people of the world would never come to an end. MansFeld, Germany 2012, 98 min. director: Mario Schneider, cinematography: Florian Kirchler/Mario Schneider, languages: German, distributor: 42film Berlin screenings: Hackesche Höfe, Fsk, Babylon Mitte Special screening with director Mario Schneider present: Tonight, Thursday May 16th, 8 pm, at Hackesche Höfe To win 3×2 tickets for the special screening tonight at Hackesche Höfe, send an email to toby@stilinberlin.de (until 4 pm), subject line: fairy tale. First come, first served: the first three emails win. The screening will be in German, no subtitles. Discover This! is a weekly Berlin–based film comment.