Petites histoires en Turkestan

July 1932: Ella Maillart set out to make her way across Central Asia. It was there she hoped to find a nomadic way of life untouched by the Soviet policies of forcibly settling the nomads and imposing modernisation. From the peaks of Tien Chan to the legendary towns of Turkestan, she travelled through Central Asia and brought back her travel notes and impressions, testimonies and a great many photos. Seventy years later, another traveller leaves to take up Ella’s tracks and on his route discovers an unusual and fascinating region, meeting up with nomad families, a former Kolkhoz worker now converted to market-economy thinking, a woman orchestra conductor, a spice trader… This documentary springs out of a curiosity to compare two visions of travel at two critical periods: Ella Maillart was writing almost ten years after the sovietisation of the region, and the film was made almost ten years after the former Soviet republics gained their independence.