Aralkum
by Daniel Asadi Faezi and Mila Zhluktenko
Once the Earth’s fourth largest body of inland water, the Aral Sea has depleted by ninety percent since 1960 after the Soviet Union diverted its tributaries for agricultural irrigation. This short film plants us where the Aral Sea once lay—an eerie and disorienting landscape now known as the Aralkum, the youngest desert in the world. There, a sole species of tree lives in the absence of a once-rich marine ecosystem; and the last human inhabitants of the former shoreline try to navigate survival in a desolate landscape.
