The program “Wind, the Homeless Wanderer” is timed to coincide with the II Korkut Triennale of Sonic Arts. Thematically, this film program—comprising five screenings—also takes the wind as its starting point and translates its exploration into the realm of the image. 

How can one capture the invisible? In photographer Robert Frank’s film Life Dances On, there is an image of a man trying to photograph the wind. He manages to capture only objects that the wind sets in motion. Cinema comes close to the task of catching the wind—the objects that the wind sets in motion also move on the screen. The wind and cinema become partners in this endeavor—the element sets objects in motion, and cinema allows this movement to be captured.

But what should a director do with the captured wind? In most films, we are sure to find a random breeze, not conceived as a specific image. For the most part, the wind chooses the films, not the other way around. For centuries, poets and writers have found a wide variety of uses for the wind: it brings change, good and troubling news, stirs up melancholy, and disperses joy. These same motifs can be traced in narrative cinema. The elusive materiality of the wind allows directors to take it and imbue it with any necessary meaning—but in this hierarchy, the image-author, in the case of the wind, still leaves the impression, if not of the image’s complete dominance, then of its significant autonomy. In this program, we have gathered films whose creators have managed to enter into a dialogue with the wind and, precisely because of it, tell the story they wanted to tell—through animation, sound, and documentary.

In Stefan Djordjevic’s film Wind, Talk to Me, the wind rustles the leaves of the trees in the family home, which the director’s mother left not long ago, and becomes a conduit to the world of the dead, building a bridge between the present and the past.

Kyrgyz cinema, whose action often unfolds in villages or even remote mountain settlements, has historically had a special relationship with the wind. It is clearly present in the films of directors who began working at the dawn of the republic’s independence: Aktan Arym Kubat, Ernest Abdyzhaparov, and Temir Birnazarov do not focus exclusively on the wind, but give it free rein in their poetic sketches, whether it be a coming-of-age story in the form of a mosaic of rural reality (Selkinchek), an abstract Beckettian tale of (un)love (Taranchy), or a documentary sketch of life in picturesque yet perilous conditions (The Devil’s Bridge).

Hayao Miyazaki, in his anti-war masterpiece The Wind Rises, uses the wind in two ways. On the one hand, it inspires the protagonist, an engineer, to build airplanes that outpace the elements. The quotation from Paul Valéry’s poem, which forms the basis of the title, becomes the central life principle that gives meaning to the journey: “The wind rises!… We must try to live.” On the other hand, the strengthening wind signifies the impossibility of controlling external circumstances—the approaching war, for which the engineer’s creations are used.

In The Wind, Viktor Sjöström masterfully dispenses with sound—sandstorms are present as visual imagery, and their howling is reflected only in the frenzied eyes of the protagonist. Here, the wind becomes an insurmountable force, a fate and a curse for the young woman resisting her circumstances.

And the Mongolian film City of Wind by Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir shows us Ulaanbaatar, where a gray and dehumanized modernity, like a violent storm, sweeps away the customs and rituals carried on by a gentle breeze from the past—those that connect the spiritual world of the ancestors with the material one.