Uzbekistan, a sandy former Soviet republic in Central Asia, is one of the last places you’d expect to house a world-class art museum. But it does. How that came to be is told in the informative but standard documentary “The Desert of Forbidden Art.”
The story starts with Igor Savitsky (1915-1984), a frustrated painter who during the Soviet years collected illegal art and housed it in a museum in the tiny town of Nukus, which is so isolated that the KGB never bothered with it.
Today the collection is worth untold millions. Savitsky, whose letters and journals are voiced by Ben Kingsley, collected almost 45,000 pieces of avant-garde art by people who were imprisoned or even executed because they displeased the Kremlin.
The film, directed by Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev, mixes loving shots of the art itself with vintage news footage and interviews with Savitsky’s son, assorted experts and other survivors.
We’re told that Savitsky even managed to get the government to give money to the museum. Sadly, with the Soviet Union gone, the art faces a new enemy: Islamic extremists.