In Memoriam Sadullo Rakhimov (1951-2024)

Sadullo had a tremendous smile. When we met, it seemed the entire world had filled with sunshine. He would attentively, with his entire body, lean towards you and listen to the most banal news as if they was terrifically important. With a PhD in philosophy, he was a very respected man in his circles, yet his demeanour was always plain. It was a pleasure talking to him because conversations brought a sense of rest, clarity and confidence.

It fell on him to be the director of the film studio Tajikfilm (1995–1997) in the difficult years of the civil war. By profession Sadullo Rakhimov was a philosopher, yet he dealt with issues of aesthetics of Tajik culture, and all his life was connected to cinema. Before enrolling at the faculty of Russian language and literature at the Tajik State University, he worked in 1968/69 as assistant director of fiction films at the film studio Tajikfilm. And then, while he was making his academic career, he was involved in cinema all the time. Thus, he was scriptwriter for more than 20 documentary films.

More than a quarter of a century he worked at the Bogoutdinov Institute of Philosophy, Political Science and Rights of the Republic of Tajikistan, from research associate to head of department of the philosophy of culture. His doctoral dissertation was on the subject “Philosophical and Aesthetic Ideas of Zoroastrism”. But alongside profoundly philosophical subjects he wrote about the culture of Tajikistan, especially theatre and cinema.

Practically all modern books about Tajik cinema were created by him or made with his participation, including The Screen Beam (Luch ekrana, in Tajik and Russian, 2004), Encyclopaedia of the Cinema of Tajikistan (with G. Elbaum, 2012), and Essays on the Theory and History of Tajik Cinema (2020). Moreover, we always turned to him for general collections on the cinema of Central Asia, such as Cinema in Central Asia (London, 2013) or The Unknown New Wave of Central Asian Cinema (Seoul, 2013). Sadullo Rakhimov is the author over a hundred articles about Tajik cinema, and he passed the baton to the young scholar Sharofat Arabova.

Especially noteworthy is Sadullo Rakhimov’s role as programme director of the film festival Didor, which was held nine times and which he ran together with the artistic director Safar Khakdodov. The festival brought together cinematographers from Central Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, the Caucasus region and Russia. It was a most amazing event, both with its fantastic organising team and a programme finely compiled by Sadullo Rakhimov: the programme was a ray of light that brought together the best intentions of people to live in peace and harmony. Didor had a special place thanks to its specific mission of uniting the worlds of Turan and Iran, and beyond it, all of Eurasia. Only a Philosopher and Humanist with a capital letter could do that: Sadullo Rakhimov.

Gulnara Abikeeva