FILM

In 1931 Russian psychologist Alexander Romanovitch Luria travelled to Uzbekistan to interview the cotton farmers there. The purpose of his study was to test the results of the education programme put into place a few years before by the Soviet authorities in order to spread the principles of Socialism. In these videos, fragments of these interviews are combined with digital animations based on the photographs of Max Person, who portrayed the every-day life of 1930’s Uzbekistan. The result, both revealing and humorous, powerfully illustrates the role of language in an indoctrinating effort to transform a culture in the name of education and modernisation.