Every year, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers leave Tajikistan in search of employment. The money sent back provides a huge boost to the economy; in fact, Tajikistan is the most remittance-dependent country in the world. The vast majority of these migrants are male, which means the Tajik population is becoming ever-more female. So what happens to the women who are left behind?
Behind the Wheel serves as an inquiry into the moral and emotional turmoil of Nigora, an Uzbek woman whose traditional life of being a housewife is interrupted after her migrant husband fails to send back enough money and she finds out he has been having an affair. No longer able to rely on her husband, Nigora defies prevailing gender norms and sets to work fixing car tyres.

Elise is a recent graduate of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, where she received training in observational filmmaking. Alongside her MA, she hold a BA in French and Russian from University of Nottingham. Elise has travelled extensively throughout Central Asia and has a fascination with post-Soviet countries.

Production: The Granada Center for Visual Anthropology, University of Mancherster, UK
Director, camera: Elise Laker
Dialogues: Uzbeck, subtitles: English, Czech
 

The Kyrgyz Organisation CBT (Kyrgyz Community Based Tourism Association) made an advertisement in an alpine newspaper with the help of a Swiss Tourist. They were looking for a cheese maker to teach interested women in a mountain region village in Arslanbob about cheese making. Maike Oestreich, a cheese maker and farmer based in Switzerland decided to spend her summer in the Kyrgyz mountains for once rather than on an alp in Switzerland. She has never crossed the borders of Europe before.
The movie shows, how this specific knowledge is transferred and transformed in a completely different context and what kind of problems arise, when different actors with theirs different intentions are involved in a kind of voluntary development aid project.
The filmmaker was following the cheese maker from her working place in the alpine dairy in Sufers in Switzerland to the world’s largest walnut forest in Arslanbob to accompany and observe her ongoing project.

Ramona Helena Sonderegger is Primary teacher and has BA in Social Anthropology, Psychology and Political Sciences at the University of Zurich.

production, director, camera: Ramona Helena Sonderegger
Dialogues: English, Deutch, Uzbec
Subtitles: English, Czech
 

After having worked for 18 years in the U.S., the „sans-papier“ Richar returns to his country Ecuador with his new American wife. Although divorced from his former wife, he is still very attached to his three children.
The reunion with the family and with old friends shows in a personal way the tensions as well as the hopes and the courage to face the difficult reality of a migrant. The filmmaker, to whom Richar is linked by a friendship since an anthropological field reasearch 30 years ago, follows him during the first weeks of his return to his village in the Andes.

Hans-Jurg is born in Zurich, Switzerland. He studied cultural Anthropology in Zurich and Ecuador where he met the main character of the movie. He has made various documentaries.

Dialogues: Spanish, English, subtitles: English, Czech
Production: Prodok film, Zurich
Director, camera: Hans-Jurg Pffaf