The Films of Ikram Nurmehmet

Source: China File (7/3/25)
Balancing What Can Be Said with What Can Only Be Implied: The Films of Ikram Nurmehmet
By Shelly Kraicer

The young Uyghur filmmaker Ikram Nurmehmet is now in a Chinese prison. Arrested in May 2023, he was accused by the Chinese government of “actively participating in terrorist activities.” Human Rights Watch called the charges “politically motivated,” and reported that Ikram was “tortured . . . until he gave a false confession.” Convicted in January 2024, Ikram was sentenced to six and a half years behind bars. He was likely targeted because he had studied in Turkey between 2010 and 2016. His arrest and imprisonment has occurred in the context of Chinese authorities’ continuing persecution of minority groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region that has intensified since 2017.

It is always difficult for what China calls “ethnic minority” (i.e. non-Han Chinese) filmmakers to make the films they want to make inside China, where review by the state Film Administration is mandatory for all. Staying inside the system allows filmmakers to have their work shown publicly in China and, if they can get official approval, abroad. What may be surprising is that filmmakers from Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang have succeeded in making important and eloquent works of cinema that grapple, at least indirectly, with the particular situations of their communities in China, despite the constraints under which they work.

Since 2017, a new generation of Uyghur filmmakers, including Ikram Nurmehmet, Tawfiq Nizamidin, Emetjan Memet, Mirzat Abduqadir, and Pahriya Ghalip, has emerged. Most studied at the Beijing Film Academy, and all have made creatively challenging, formally interesting, socially engaged short films that carefully explore—with humor, passion, and a savvy sense of how to balance what can be said with what can only be implied—what life is like for Uyghurs in China today.

A close reading of Ikram’s four short films—from Elephant in the Car’s mysterious energy, through the absurdly dark comedy of Ridiculous Nurshad and rambunctious humor of Tu Cheshang Erbai (200 Per Puke), to the brilliant formal control of A Day by the Sea—can elucidate some ways that a filmmaker under systemic political pressure can navigate the closely regulated Chinese censorship system while preserving an articulate, sustainable, and authentically expressive voice.

Any Chinese artist, writer, or filmmaker who chooses to sustain a career within China while simultaneously maintaining a creative and critical engagement with current Chinese social and political conditions will face similar challenges: of how much directly to express (or not express) in their work; of how much meaning can be suggested by significant gaps or absences; of how artistic formal decisions and structures can implicitly articulate truths that can’t be uttered directly without risking censorship or punishment.

Unfortunately, none of Ikram’s films are currently available to the public, and that is not likely to change until he is released from incarceration. But the films are an important way to understand what is happening in Xinjiang, and how Uyghurs are responding to the crisis artistically.

Elephant in the Car (拼车, Pinche, 2020), Ikram’s first short film, challenges us right away with its English title: What is this elephant? We spend most of the film’s 17 minutes inside a rideshare late at night in Beijing. A jovial Chinese driver picks up a Chinese woman wearing a 3M facemask. She sits in the back. We hear the driver pester her, offering her candies, which she declines. She clearly wants to be left alone. The driver then picks up two men who get in the back—it’s a pooled rideshare. She moves to the front. The two men speak Uyghur to each other. One describes an abortive hotel hookup that was interrupted by a police check, whereupon the woman he was pursuing snuck off.

As the female passenger remains silent, the cabbie grills the two Uyghur men in an ostensibly friendly manner, enthusing about his time working on a Xinjiang oil site. He learns that one of the men is a drummer and falls into what could pass as friendly ethnic stereotyping in a Chinese context: praising the musicality of all Uyghurs. The two men then obligingly play him a Uyghur song from their phone, followed by a song he requests.

The woman in the front seat finally speaks and asks to get out. She claims she has to buy something, but seems eager to abandon the car. As the car drives off without her, she walks alone down the street, the camera follows her, and the second song we heard in the car becomes audible again, as if we can hear the song emanating from her own memory of it.

In a promotional poster for Elephant in the Car a massive elephant, head swathed in smoke, kneels on top of a car, partially crushing it. English speakers can’t help but think of the phrase “the elephant in the room.” But what in the film is obviously present yet stubbornly unacknowledged? It may be the weight of the relationship between the colonizer (the Han Chinese driver) and the colonized (the male Uyghur passengers) that hovers above their conversation. It may also be the way patriarchal structures differentiate how the Chinese woman passenger and the men in the car react: The men speculate in Uyghur if they should try picking up the woman. Though she can’t understand their words, her unease is palpable. The way ethnicity and patriarchy intersect here complicates the various lines of tension among the people in the car: Do the Uyghurs speak their own language to shield themselves from the Chinese cabbie? Is this what alienates the Chinese woman, inadvertently prompting her to flee the car?

The film provokes many such questions. One possible answer (among many): According to the film’s producer, Tawfiq Nizamidin, during one post-screening Q&A, Ikram mentioned that he and Tawfiq deliberately constructed a story in which an increasing sense of menace seemed to be heading towards a climax. But the film withholds an ending that might provide a sense of finality. It’s not unreasonable to connect this sense of increasing menace and absence of clear outcome to the emotional and existential state experienced by many Uyghurs in China at the time the film was conceived and shot. And even today.

Ikram’s second film, Ridiculous Nurshad (2022), allows more of its meanings to float, carefully, somewhat closer to its surface. This 31-minute-long black-and-white film takes place almost completely in an apartment in Ürümchi at the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020. Four young adult Uyghur men have gathered for a meal. One of the guests talks on his phone as the host cooks polo, or pilaf, a traditional Uyghur dish of mixed lamb, rice, and carrots. The third guest, Nurshad, sits watching Emir Kusturica’s 1995 film Underground on TV. (Underground is a dark, surreal comedy that follows a group of Yugoslav arms manufacturers who live in a cellar for decades, manipulated into believing that World War II is still ongoing, while above ground their countrymen experience the rise and fall of communist Yugoslavia through to the Yugoslav Wars.) The fourth man, Nijat, arrives late, after trying to deliver snacks to his friend Mewlan’s family, who are shut up in their Ürümchi apartment under strict quarantine because Mewlan has just returned from Wuhan, the pandemic epicenter.

The film opens in the hallway outside Mewlan’s apartment, where we see one female guard from the neighborhood committee change shifts with another. They are eating a bag of pistachios, presumably the snacks Nijat had tried to deliver to Mewlan. Once the four men in the apartment begin their meal, Ikram’s camera moves in 90-degree segments, showing in turn each man on his side of the dining-room table. Several seconds of black screen abruptly separate each shot. The choice of filming in black and white suggests the unreality of, or perhaps even opens a space to appreciate, at a distance, the absurdity of what the men talk about.

The men have a long and sometimes impassioned discussion about the nature of COVID, a conversation which becomes more and more “ridiculous” as Nurshad insists that Uyghurs are impervious to the virus. He compares infection rates and speculates that it’s something genetic that protects them. The other three object that this is unfounded speculation. One points out the unfairness of what’s happening to them as Uyghurs, since “those things are passing” and seem to have gotten better lately. Nurshad says, “Only wars and famines have caused us mass deaths. But never plagues.” In this context, they discuss karma, good people getting the rewards they earn and bad people receiving punishments they deserve. At one point, one of them suggests they had best change the topic and speculates that they may be heard through the walls. That’s as close as the conversation comes to acknowledging the dangers of discussing sensitive political issues.

They decide to settle the COVID dispute by calling a friend, an ophthalmologist named “Dr. Li” in Macau.

Dr. Li doesn’t reply, and they attempt to call Mewlan’s home to check on him. Mewlan responds with a video, and several shots of Mewlan’s baroquely decorated home follow: a chess set on a table, some toys, the abandoned guard post outside. We see no one, but we hear, faintly, the voices of someone playing chess, someone chopping vegetables. (Have they vanished? Where? For how long?) The elephant(s) missing from this room have at least become semi-audible.

One particular line from Kusturica’s Underground is audible near the end of the film, and this is quite deliberate: “What’s past is past. Let bygones be bygones.” This quotation seems to be a pointed message to viewers, suggesting that historical cycles of persecution and revenge must be broken if future generations are to have peaceful lives.

Ikram followed with a very short film, also in 2022, that premiered at the Xining First Film Festival 2022 as part of its “short shorts” section. In 5 minutes and 16 seconds, shot on an iPhone, Tu Cheshang Erbai (roughly translated as “200 Yuan a Puke”) puts us back inside a cab. This time the tables are turned: The driver is Uyghur and the passenger is Han.

A group of late-night Han Chinese partiers hail the cab and deposit an intoxicated man inside, instructing the driver to take him home. The passenger is on the verge of vomiting. The driver nervously refuses, then accepts the ride when offered an extra 200 yuan (about $30). The driver finds an empty parking lot and deliberately drives around it as fast as possible, provoking the passenger to puke rather conveniently out the open right rear window. This is all shown with playfully animated enhancements to the live-action shot, all set to a rousing traditional Uyghur song, “Yaru,” by Perhat Khaliq. Just a simple high-spirited gross-out comedy? Or a somewhat edgy reimagining of Elephant in the Car—but this time the Uyghur driver has the upper hand? And it should be noted that the Uyghur who temporarily occupies this unexpectedly dominant position is no thief (contrary to a commonly-held stereotype among Han Chinese): He returns the 200 yuan to the passenger, who, after all, didn’t puke in the car.

A Day by the Sea (2022) is the last film Ikram made before he was arrested and imprisoned. 21 minutes long, it is shot largely in clear, symmetrical long takes in a completely different style from the preceding three shorts. Its tone and tempo are calm, quiet, beautiful, and classical. There is no dialogue at all. We hear spare, lyrical music. As the film opens, several people seen from above walk to a parking lot carrying boxes containing their belongings, as if they have just been laid off. Among them is a Han Chinese man (played by the filmmaker Li Baojiu), who gets into his car and drives along a country road, apparently looking for something. He stops and walks to a beach, in bright sunlight. In one continuous shot from an angle directly behind him, he slowly walks into the water while still wearing a business suit. As he is buffeted by waves, he disappears underneath the water’s surface. One of his shoes appears on the beach. He is gone.

We then see, in soft, dreamy, shallow focus, several extreme closeups of a barefoot Uyghur woman in a white summer dress. The hand-held camera stays very close to her: We only see her in minute, sectioned details. The scene then changes to an abandoned building, where a fire burns as she sits on a window ledge. Then we return to the beach, where the man has washed up on the sand, soaked, gasping for breath. He has returned.

Was he just dreaming about her? Did the woman in the dream bring him back to life? He goes back to the car, retrieves his box of belongings and a folding chair, sets them down on the beach, strips off his business suit, and lights the assemblage on fire. His face is illuminated by the flames as he walks out of the shot.

A Day by the Sea raises the question: What is a “Uyghur film”? The protagonist is Han Chinese; the Uyghur character is almost ephemeral. Is a film by a Uyghur filmmaker with no spoken language, that doesn’t directly address Uyghur culture or identity, still a “Uyghur film?” Does that term even have any useful, stable meaning? People and communities have ethnicity; films don’t. One would have to ask Ikram if he considers this film to be a Uyghur film, but unfortunately he is in no position to answer our questions. What’s clear, though, is that Ikram’s filmmaking practice here extends to embrace a narrative that is not explicitly centering “Uyghurness.” This practice opens a door to an alternative way for Uyghur filmmakers to engage with the dominant Han Chinese culture.

This is also a substantial stylistic departure for Ikram: mysterious, spare, elegant, open-ended. The man seems suicidal, alone, and is perhaps miraculously saved. By the memory of a Uyghur woman? By chance? By something we can’t begin to understand?

It’s difficult, looking back, knowing Ikram Nurmehmet is in a Chinese prison, not to see A Day By The Sea as a kind of eerie premonition of the fate of an artist, alone, walking towards something that might be oblivion. But the man in the film does not drown in the sea. He does not disappear. Neither will Ikram. But he will only be able to develop the astonishing creative energy that these first films display once he is again free.