VOICES OF THE MOUNTAINS  
dir. Laboratory for visual storytelling

We land on a desert landscape, cracked and dry. Water is present among the clay-colored ruins rising from the rocky ground. The ochre tones evoke the inside of a mountain, a past once open to the sky. What does the earth hide?

Within the ruins, we can still make out the structure of a house, of a city. Ruins are evidence of collapse: first they lose their roofs, and the house loses its essence as a shelter. It is an abandoned city. Yet the columns and the lower parts of the walls remain, holding the memory of a home.
We hear voices emerging from the walls, allowing us to reconstruct the past of the ruins. In this sequence of voices, we hear women, objects, children, birds… All of them remember and return like spirits within a collective memory.

Nature becomes a devastating presence, while at the same time we hear the fragility of children playing. The sound of the wind strikes the microphone, and the fragments of the kishlak resonate through the friction of its rocks. Mudslides have carried away time itself, along with the roofs of the houses. What remains in this place are memory, language, and drawing — ways of continuing onward, rooted in the past and in collective youth.

Created collectively by young authors, the film reveals a communal force that shapes space through words. The white-line animation contrasts with the intense, arid ochre palette. With an innocent, childlike stroke, it also sketches the presence of family and culture.




When animation finds its freedom, what cannot be filmed emerges. Like layers beneath the earth's surface, animation moves through the textures of the invisible: it can make imagination, dreams, and sensations tangible. Across landscape shots, the drawings overlay the image to inhabit the cracks and gaps of memory. At times, however, the animation feels too timid and confined within its looping motion, as though it were asking for a freer exploration of movement — something closer to the uncontrollable pulse of nature itself.

The short film weaves together the destiny of the mountains and the people who inhabit them. Voice-over, line art, and video come together to create a subtle and beautiful piece. Like a poem about life, the film offers a generational chorus of patient, gentle voices set against the sublime landscape. There is a longing for flowers, and the voice that returns most insistently is that of water — a feminine, maternal voice that opens and closes the film. Animation itself becomes a gesture of bringing the inert to life. Perhaps, within its quiet rhythm and attentive observation, there is a silent cry to the contemporary world: a plea to protect the source of life itself.

Voices of the mountains

Directed by Laboratory for visual storytelling

"Voices of the Mountains" is an animated documentary created with young authors from Tajikistan, reflecting on a mountain town affected by mudslides. Through drawings and personal narration, the film explores how natural disaster becomes part of everyday memory — not as a catastrophe, but as a lived reality. Nature here is not a backdrop, but a fragile archive where human voices, loss, and resilience coexist.