Preserving the Past in THE DESERT OF FORBIDDEN ART with Director Amanda Pope

Guest Bio

Emmy award winning director Amanda Pope’s directing, producing, writing, and editing credits over her more than 20 year long career include documentary, dramatic, and social advocacy programs. Her work has focused on the dynamics of creativity in fine art, public art happenings, urban design, theatre and dance. Her award­ winning public television documentaries: Jackson Pollock Portrait, Stages: Houseman Directs Lear, narrated by Jason Robards and Cities for People, narrated by Cloris Leachman have all been broadcast nationally on PBS. Her program series, Faces Of Change, documented grassroots reformers and emerging leaders in seven countries of the former USSR. Most recently she directed The Legend Of Pancho Barnes And The Happy Bottom Riding Club about a pioneer woman aviator. The film was honored with a 2011 Los Angeles Area Emmy in the arts and culture/history category, broadcast over 1200 times on American Public Television for PBS and featured at numerous festivals and screening venues. Amanda has served on the Board of New York Women in Film, the Women in Film Foundation in Los Angeles, and has been a jury member for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences student films, The Humanitas Prize, and the International Documentary Association’s feature documentaries. Amanda is a Professor in production at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.

DESERT OF FORBIDDEN ART, is the documentary exploring one man defied Soviet rule to rescue 40,000 works of art. Igor Savitsky pretended to buy state­ approved art but instead daringly rescued 40,000 forbidden fellow artist’s works and created a museum in the desert of Uzbekistan, far from the watchful eyes of the KGB. Though a penniless artist himself, he cajoled the cash to pay for the art from the same authorities who are banning it. Savitsky amasses an eclectic mix of Russian Avant­Garde art. But his greatest discovery is an unknown school of artists who settle in Uzbekistan after the Russian revolution of 1917, encountering a unique Islamic culture, as exotic to them as Tahiti was for Gauguin. They develop a startlingly original style, fusing European modernism with centuries­ old Eastern traditions. Ben Kingsley, Sally Field and Ed Asner voice the diaries and letters of Savitsky and the artists. Intercut with recollections of the artists’ children and rare archival footage, the film takes us on a dramatic journey of sacrifice for the sake of creative freedom. Described as “one of the most remarkable collections of 20th century Russian art” and located in one of the world’s poorest regions, today these paintings are worth millions, a lucrative target for Islamic fundamentalists, corrupt bureaucrats and art profiteers. The collection remains as endangered as when Savitsky first created it, posing the question whose responsibility is it to preserve this cultural treasure.