PATH is a film about movement—not simply across landscapes, but between cultures, artistic forms, histories and ways of seeing. What began as an experimental art project connected to the creation of a pavilion in Kyrgyzstan gradually evolved into something more personal: a cinematic reflection on the road taken to realize an artistic vision, and on everything encountered along the way.
Moving through the immense landscapes of Kyrgyzstan and the cultural memory connecting Central Asia with the Persian world, PATH resists the conventions of a straightforward behind-the-scenes documentary. Instead, the film combines intimate observation with mythology, history and a distinctly visual sensibility shaped by its director’s background in painting, music, installation and contemporary art. The journey becomes simultaneously physical and metaphysical—a meditation on exile, belonging, collaboration and the possibility of finding a sense of home beyond national borders.
At the same time, PATH does not romanticize artistic creation by concealing its practical realities. Financial negotiations, institutional pressures, disagreements and questions of artistic independence become part of the story itself. For its filmmaker, these obstacles are not distractions from the creative process but integral to it: another landscape through which an artist must travel while attempting to protect freedom of expression.
In this conversation, we discuss the unusual evolution of PATH, the filmmaker’s relationship with Kyrgyzstan and the interconnected histories of Iran and Central Asia, the influence of Eastern mythology and Western cinema on his work, and his belief in art not simply as a political instrument but as a transformative space capable of creating dialogue. The result is a conversation about filmmaking, certainly, but also about exile, cultural memory, independence and what it means to continue moving when the destination itself becomes less important than the path.
Patrick Roy, UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): The title PATH comes from the Turkic word “Jol,” and the film presents the journey as both physical and metaphysical. At what point did you realize that the road itself—not simply the creation of the Kyrgyz Pavilion—was actually the subject of the film?
Firouz FarmanFarmaian (FF): The film actually began as an art project.
From our first journeys to Kyrgyzstan, we filmed core material for the Pavilion’s videosphere. At that stage, the project was called Jol—the Kyrgyz word for “path”—and I imagined it as a sonic, abstract art film.
As the project grew, a French production company came on board and the film began moving in a more conventional documentary direction, but the editorial line never fully materialized. Eventually, our production company We R the Nomads with the backing of our U.S. partners took the project back. As I delved into the writing – I realized that the real story was the road itself: everything we had crossed, physically and creatively, to make the Pavilion happen. That’s when Jol became PATH.
The physical and metaphysical journeys also reflect how I work between Eastern and Western mindsets. Eastern storytelling often draws on myth, metaphor and epic landscapes, while Western auteur cinema tends toward something more immediate and grounded. The film moves between those two languages—from vast landscapes to intimate, handheld images.
(UM): You entered Kyrgyzstan as an artist from outside the culture, while at the same time becoming deeply involved in presenting its heritage internationally. Did you ever question your own right to tell this story, and how did you negotiate the boundary between cultural collaboration and cultural appropriation?
(FF): I never really experienced Kyrgyzstan as a foreign cultural space. There is an ancient kinship across the greater Persian and Central Asian world, stretching through Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Our histories and mythologies have crossed for millennia—from the ancient Saka cultures to two extraordinary epic traditions that eventually crystallized in the Persian Shahnameh and the Kyrgyz Manas.
There is also something more personal. As my cousin Amir says in the film, for those of us who have lost our country and become exiles—nomadic in our hearts—travelling through this region can produce a profound sense of returning home. It relates to the idea of Heimat: a home that is emotional and cultural rather than simply territorial.
So I don’t believe cultures should be sealed within boundaries. My own condition is one of nomadic displacement and international fluidity. I see myself as a borderless, planetary thinker, and I believe the future is created precisely where cultures meet—through difference, dialogue and sometimes friction. That is where the avant-garde has always existed.
For me, the responsibility is therefore not to avoid cultural exchange, but to make it genuinely collaborative and respectful. I wrote in my Venice manifesto about an “ecology of the soul”: before we can imagine an ecology of the planet, we need an ecology within ourselves. Interconnectedness and intercultural dialogue are fundamental to that.
(UM): The film seems to move between Eastern mythological traditions and a more Western cinematic narrative structure. Was that combination something you consciously designed from the beginning, or did it emerge naturally from your own mixed cultural experience as an artist?
(FF): It emerged very naturally from my own cultural and artistic experience. My work as a contemporary artist has always tried to foster dialogue while moving across media within one global language.
I began as a painter and musician, and gradually developed a more cinematic approach through installations combining sound, video, pictorial work and textile. So moving between Eastern mythological traditions and a more Western cinematic structure wasn’t something I needed to consciously construct for PATH—it was already embedded in the way I work.
(UM): The film seems far from romantic: there are financial problems, bureaucracy, political tension, and even questions from local artists about your presence as an outsider. Why was it important for you to show those fractures rather than make a celebratory film about the Pavilion?
(FF): We first have to define what we mean by romance. In the medieval sense, romance is precisely about the inner and outer battles one must overcome to reach a coveted, seemingly unattainable goal—the princess in the distant castle.
Seen this way, showing the hardships of the path toward realizing a vision is profoundly romantic, and ultimately celebratory. The financial difficulties, bureaucracy, political tensions and disagreements were not fractures to hide; they were part of the journey.
A strong idea will always provoke debate. I was always confident that, through those obstacles, we would achieve something singular and meaningful.
(UM): One of the most interesting ideas in the film is the dialogue between Persian and Kyrgyz narratives, particularly through Shahnameh and the Kyrgyz epic Manas. What did you discover in Kyrgyz culture that unexpectedly reminded you of your own Persian cultural inheritance?
(FF): If you know Persian history, the connection is actually very ancient. It reaches back beyond the Achaemenids to the Indo-European migrations and the Saka tribes, some of whom remained in Central Asia, notably around the Fergana Valley, while others moved south toward the Caspian and northern Iran. These estranged branches would later confront one another, giving rise to the historical and mythological opposition between Iran and Turan—hence the title of our Venice exhibition, The Gates of Turan.
What fascinated me most was discovering how this distant kinship survives through the great epics. The Shahnameh and Manas both became vessels through which memories of pre-Islamic cultures were preserved across centuries.
The extraordinary difference is in their transmission: the Shahnameh crystallized as a written literary masterpiece, while Manas survived through an immense oral tradition before eventually being transcribed. They are very different works, but they carry echoes of a remarkably ancient shared cultural geography.
(UM): There is a moment in the film when you stand alone on a windswept plateau and describe something close to a spiritual awakening. What happened to you in that moment, and did the experience change your understanding of why you were making the film?
(FF): Kyrgyzstan arrived at a pivotal moment in my life, spiritually but also in my practice. After twenty years of moving between painting, music, textile, film and installation, I felt that these different languages were finally becoming a coherent whole. That interconnectedness is very close to the Zen way of approaching space, where nothing really exists in isolation.
I remember driving for hours toward Song-Köl, high in the Tian Shan mountains. The lake remained this distant blue line that never seemed to get any closer. Eventually we stopped and I began walking toward it through this immense landscape of low vegetation. At some point, I understood that I wasn’t going to “reach” it, so I simply sat down.
I experienced what I can only describe as the loudest silence of my life. There was not a single sound. Everything was completely still. And suddenly I had this extraordinary sensation that I was simply sitting on a round ball, spinning through the universe.
That moment encapsulated something essential about why I was there—and ultimately about what PATH became: sometimes the journey stops being about reaching a destination and becomes an experience of interconnectedness itself.
(UM): The film also includes a striking contradiction: an artist concerned with cultural preservation and spiritual experience is shown negotiating with mining interests in Dubai. Were you deliberately trying to expose the compromises artists sometimes have to make in order to realize ambitious work?
(FF): I don’t really see it as a contradiction. There is a moment in the film where Amir recalls watching Lucian Freud working a room and wondering whether an artist should have to play that game. His conclusion stayed with me: what makes an artist interesting is precisely the tension between the ivory tower and the street.
There is perhaps a slightly naïve idea that artists somehow exist outside the realities of money, patronage and power. They never have. Today, in the age of Spotify and Netflix, the pressure to conform to formats is perhaps stronger than ever. The artist’s role is precisely to push against those formats and test their boundaries.
For me, independent thinking and independent funding go hand in hand. Finding the means to produce ambitious work without surrendering control is part of protecting the freedom that allows the work to exist in the first place.
And that is precisely why I chose to show these negotiations rather than hide them. I wanted other artists to see the path—to show that the means to preserve independence and freedom of expression are out there to be found and seized.
(UM): You describe cultural preservation not as nostalgia but as something living and evolving. In practical terms, what does that mean? How do we preserve traditions without turning them into museum objects or romantic images of a lost past?
(FF): I have often written in my catalogues, including in Venice, that contemporary art is fundamentally a transformative process. Something that might otherwise remain forgotten in the dusty corners of an ethnographic museum can, through contemporary practice, suddenly become completely relevant—even avant-garde. That transformative power is one of the great possibilities of art.
I approach film in exactly the same way. I am a contemporary artist making films, so for me a film is approached much like an installation or an artwork.
In Kyrgyzstan, that meant working with traditions dating back millennia: collaborating directly with the Altyn Kol craftswomen in the Kochkor Valley while researching in Bishkek with scholars and institutions. By connecting research, living craftsmanship and contemporary practice, something entirely new can emerge without erasing where it came from.
This also relates to what I have called my post-tribal approach and an “ecology of the soul.” Many ancient and tribal cultures preserve an intimate relationship with Mother Earth that modern organized societies have progressively pushed aside. At a moment of global warming, when the planet is literally burning, perhaps some of that ancestral knowledge is not about looking backward at all—it may help us imagine how to move forward.
(UM): You are simultaneously the filmmaker, artist, composer and, in a sense, one of the main characters of PATH. How difficult was it to edit yourself? Were there moments when the filmmaker in you wanted to reveal something that the person in you would rather have kept private?
(FF): To understand PATH, you have to remember that the film itself happened as a process. I began with a conceptual art film . A separate production company then started developing a more conventional documentary, which I didn’t initially control. I recovered that project mid-course, when most of the footage had already been shot, and began constructing the journey you now see.
Editing myself was actually creatively stimulating. I had directed experimental films and a documentary on North African Gnawa culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and had learned editing through that work. I enjoy being very close to the edit because I can treat the footage almost like pigment on a painter’s palette—moving fragments around until the form emerges.
The greater difficulty wasn’t exposing myself. It was finding the right distance from myself. There were frustrations, failures and difficult moments throughout the journey, but I never wanted the film to become a complaint or an exercise in self-justification.
The challenge was to remain truthful about those difficulties while ultimately allowing the energy, humour and positive force of the endeavour to prevail.
(UM): The film ultimately presents PATH as a call to dreamers and artists. But after going through the financial, political and institutional struggles shown in the film, do you still believe art can genuinely change cultural or political realities—or has your understanding of the power of art become more complicated?
(FF): I have never defined myself as an activist. Artivism emerged as a particular language around moments such as the Vietnam War, and political art has an important history, but it represents only one avenue within the very broad palette of our practice.
I like saying I’m an activator. I believe in beauty, in the positive force of the creative process, and in art’s ability to create a higher space for communication, dialogue and connection. Even in relation to my Iranian identity and the political upheavals of recent years, my position has consistently been to defend dialogue and unity against segmentation.
So the financial, political and institutional struggles of PATH haven’t diminished my belief in art. If anything, they have reinforced it. Art does not necessarily change political realities by confronting them directly. Sometimes its power lies in changing the space in which people encounter one another and imagine what might be possible.
The power of art remains fundamentally transformative.
And that is the nature of my call.