🎬 Without Fear (1972)

Ali Khamraev | 1972 | Soviet Union | 96’ | EN subtitles

A young Soviet officer arrives in 1920s Uzbekistan bearing the party’s command: emancipation. His task is to unveil: peel women’s paranja off their faces, accelerate the village into modernity. When a Komsomol teenage girl sets fire to her veil in public, the flames ignite a collision between piety and propaganda. Khamraev’s film Without Fear (Без страха, 1972) is still relevant because it dares to ask: whose freedom is it when liberation arrives as an order? And why are women always in the terrain where revolutions are fought?