Nuclear Dreams (2025) offers a poetic exploration of my father’s unrealised dreams and my own experience as an Uzbek migrant navigating uprooted identity and fractured belonging. The context is a personal space where memory and lineage meet: a young man whose plans of becoming a nuclear physicist were shaped and disrupted by history’s turbulent forces that started with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and continued with him forced into migration. 

From an intimate beginning, the film moves into Tashkent’s symbolic landscapes: once hubs of scientific ambition and cosmic dreams, they are now silent, obsolete monuments to shattered ideals. These spaces shaped a whole generation’s vision of the future, reflecting both shared hopes and the ongoing anxieties around nuclear power that continue to affect us today. I carry my father’s idealism and relentless optimism within me, guiding how I confront the challenges of displacement, migration, and the shifting geopolitics that shape my life today.

In dialogue with the CIRCA 20:25 manifesto, the film creates an emotional sanctuary (‘refugium’) for fragile, unfulfilled futures and layered histories. I hope to embrace the tension between disillusionment and optimism, loss and resilience. Like the manifesto’s call to pause and inhabit stillness amid chaos, I invite viewers into a rhetorical space of an internal dialogue: where personal/collective memory and sense of self are reflected on and speculated upon, in hopes of starting a communal polylogue.

Courtesy of the artist.

Photo: Leroy Boateng