Collection of Stones ~ 09:01 | Aleksey Ushakov | 2022 | Russian Federation

“It was dangerous to stay, due to queerness and my anti-war position,” queer identified, Russian filmmaker Aleksey Ushakov has shared about his country’s invasion of Ukraine. Vehemently opposed to the attack, Ushakov flees his homeland in the first days of the war and lands in Armenia where he makes the strikingly peaceful film, Collection of Stones. Inspired by the contemporary writer, Shamshad Abdullaev’s poem, “On The Side of the Stones”, Ushakov’s Collection of Stones is at once a cinematic experiment in pace and duration, while also a fixed-frame meditation observing one man’s sublime gentleness as he walks around a city with a box picking up select small rocks like they’re good luck charms, lunches alongside a public basketball court, rests in a park, and sits at a bus stop examining the newly gathered stones. Collection of Stones is an artifact of queerness, the kind of pause in today’s raging violence that helps create new neuro pathways, and a good symptom of an irrepressible creative spirit.

About the Artist

Aleksey Ushakov is an independent film director, writer and artist. He grew up in Russia and studied at Moscow School of New Cinema. In 2021 produced his first short film "Other". Themes reflected in his films include space, the imbuing of inanimate objects and cinema of resistance (in broader sense, as a search for forms and language facilitating resistance to capitalistic and patriarchal structures). Aleksey Ushakov unanimously supports Ukraine in its fight for freedom.