Director’s Note: 

Her Five Lives looks back on the history of Uzbek cinema by analyzing representation and transformation of Uzbek female heroines over almost a century (1925–2015). The film follows major changes in state ideology profiles in parallel with the region’s history and development of local cinema, focusing on how women were expected to be seen in society and how female characters reflected political turnovers. It consists of five chapters: “A Victim of Patriarchy (1925–1936)” depicts the position of Uzbek women in traditional Muslim society before the establishment of the Soviet Union; “A Machine of Communism (1940–1960)” portrays the transformation of women involved in industrial and economic reforms in the country as a potential workforce; “A Thawed Womanhood (1960–1985)” exposes a period of freedom in the Soviet Republics following the Khrushchev Thaw; “A Perestroika Libertine (1985–1995)” parallels the collapse of the Soviet Union with the transformation of society when the female figure became more complex in her morality; and “A Confused Independent (1996–2015)” looks at Uzbekistan’s independence, when the quantity of films focusing on female characters increased and women were more often depicted in realistic states of distress, whether in social or personal spaces.