Collection of Stones

“It was dangerous to stay, due to queerness and my anti-war position,” queer identified, Russian filmmaker Aleksey Ushakov has shared about his country’s invasion of Ukraine. Vehemently opposed to the attack, Ushakov flees his homeland in the first days of the war and lands in Armenia where he makes the strikingly peaceful film, Collection of Stones. Inspired by the contemporary writer, Shamshad Abdullaev’s poem, “On The Side of the Stones”, Ushakov’s Collection of Stones is at once a cinematic experiment in pace and duration, while also a fixed-frame meditation observing one man’s sublime gentleness as he walks around a city with a box picking up select small rocks like they’re good luck charms, lunches alongside a public basketball court, rests in a park, and sits at a bus stop examining the newly gathered stones.