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During one of the high-wire performances featured in [Kings of the Sky], witnesses speak of star acrobat Adil Hoxur disappearing into a cloudbank for 20 minutes... while walking along a cable suspended between two mountains in the Taklamakan Desert, western China! The documentary follows tightrope artist Hoxur as he and his troupe tour among the Uyghurs, a Turkish Muslim people seeking religious and political autonomy.
Hoxur has become an inadvertent national icon for his people's struggle, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Dawaz, hero of an old Uyghur myth, who once freed his countrymen from an oppressive reign of invading ghosts.
"[Kings of the Sky] offers - beautifully - another kind of filmmaking altogether... A heavy police and military presence provides a threatening backdrop for the quietly subversive behaviour of the Uyghur resistors, who defy their oppressors by wearing Islamic dress or refusing to set their clocks to Beijing time. Hoxur's gravity-defying art form provides a brilliant metaphor for life on the political brink." - Toronto Film Festival --- D/P Deborah Stratman WS Pythagoras Film L Uyghur, Mandarin, English TD video/col, B&W/2004/68mins
Deborah Stratman was born in Chicago, USA, in 1967. Her films include [The BLVD] (1999), [In Order Not to Be Here] (2003).
