Sasha: A Portrait of Alexander Povsner (2015)
Single-channel digital film projection, 16:9, 18 min 55 sec

Doa Aly met Russian sculptor Alexander “Sasha” Povsner during the 7th International Art Symposium Alanica in North Ossetia, where they were both participating artists. She was immediately drawn to Povsner’s quiet vulnerability and air of withdrawal. While the film appears to center solely on its subject (Aly herself remains behind the camera), the unspoken presence of the filmmaker is keenly felt. 

Sasha speaks, but rarely meets our gaze, embodying a distance that feels both personal and generational. A palpable tension arises between interviewer and interviewee, attraction, curiosity, and reticence coexisting in the charged space between them. His words hover between confession and refusal, revealing a mind alert to absurdity, discomfort, and contradiction.

As the film unfolds, a deeper narrative emerges, not only about art, but about estrangement, and the impossibility of translating inner experience into outward form. Sasha becomes emblematic of a broader incongruity in the contemporary art world; its dissonance, and suspended certainties. The portrait becomes an intimate record of a man held in the stillness of observation, on the threshold between presence and retreat.

Sasha was commissioned by the 7th International Art Symposium Alanica.