Darya Andijan’s new 2026 film Do You Know That I’m With You begins with a figure who has almost disappeared from cultural memory.
Travelling through Central Asia, Andijan searches for traces of Gülem, described as a forgotten goddess of carpet weaving from the Uyghur region. The 23-minute work combines travel, poetic voices, ritual and ancestral memory while addressing feminism, oppression and cultural loss produced through colonialism. It was recently added to Eye Filmmuseum’s collection of artists’ moving image.
What stays with me is the relationship between film and weaving.
A carpet produces an image by bringing separate threads into a structure.
A film can do something similar with fragments of memory.
One person remembers a story.
A place contains another trace.
A ritual survives while its original explanation becomes uncertain.
None is enough by itself.
Put them together and an image begins to return.
This is very different from reconstructing history as though every missing fact could simply be recovered.
Sometimes the gaps are part of the history.
Moving image becomes useful precisely because it can hold those fragments beside one another without pretending that the original object has been completely restored.
The film does not necessarily bring Gülem back.
It gives her fragments somewhere to meet.
https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/whats-on/new-dutch-selected-artists-moving-image/1680625
