The First Deputy Minister of Culture and Cinematography Agency Director Jahongir Akhmedov has revealed that Uzbekfilm, the country's state film studio, is in serious financial distress.
"Right now, the most pressing issue is saving Uzbekfilm and freeing it from collateral," he wrote on his Telegram channel. "Did you know that Uzbekfilm currently carries loan obligations totaling 22.9 million euros? The studio's assets — including its land — have been pledged as collateral against that debt. And that's not all. With nearly 1 billion so'm in unpaid taxes piling up, 12 vehicles on the studio's books are now at risk of being auctioned off within 12 days. Significant wage arrears have also built up for staff."
Akhmedov added that the studio cannot sustain itself unless it secures at least 60 billion so'm worth of commissioned work annually — a dependency that has left it almost entirely reliant on state orders. Uzbekfilm, he said, has no real business model of its own, and the broader industry has yet to make a full transition to market-based mechanisms.
That dependency is not incidental — it is the direct legacy of a Soviet-era planning model, under which republic-level studios like Uzbekfilm were never designed to be commercially self-sufficient. They functioned as production arms of a centrally planned state industry, receiving guaranteed annual work orders rather than competing for revenue in an open market. More than three decades after independence, Uzbekfilm still runs on that same logic: an annual quota of state-commissioned output standing in for an actual revenue base. Large infrastructure investments made in recent years — new soundstages, historical film sets, and studio reconstruction — appear to have been financed on the assumption that this state-guaranteed demand would continue indefinitely, leaving the studio increasingly leveraged against assets it does not generate enough independent income to protect.
"Behind these numbers lies a century of Uzbek cinema history — its reputation and its fate," the Cinematography Agency director said. "Uzbekfilm is where many of the country's greatest directors, actors, cinematographers, artists and film specialists got their start. Many of the films our people still love watching today were made here. That's why the task now isn't simply to keep the studio afloat — it needs to be fundamentally reformed."
What "fundamental reform" would actually require, in practice, is a break from the planned-economy template altogether: separating the studio's day-to-day production work from the government's role as its financier, replacing discretionary annual commissions with transparent, rules-based public funding tied to a clear cultural mandate, and allowing Uzbekfilm to operate on a stable, modest public subsidy rather than chasing commercial-scale state orders just to keep the lights on. Without that kind of structural separation, any debt relief the studio receives now risks simply resetting the clock on the same cycle of dependency.
