Photographers and moviemakers staged demonstrations...

On February 10, an Uzbek court found Akhmedova guilty of insulting "the whole Uzbek nation" with a series of photographs entitled Women and Men: From Dawn to Sunset and a documentary called A Burden of Virginity.

The images in question show village and rural life in Uzbekistan. They were part of a project funded by the Swiss embassy in Uzbekistan on poverty and gender inequality in the former Soviet republic. Akhmedova faced up to two years imprisonment.

Shortly before the protests, Uzbekistan pardoned Akhmedova, but the pickets were not called off and demonstrators have also called for press freedoms in the central Asian state.

Well-known Russian film directors and photographers, dressed in traditional Uzbek national costumes, are taking part in the demonstration in the Russian capital, carrying posters calling for the Uzbek nation to "be proud of Umida" and not to "return to the Middle Ages."

"An artist should be free," Viktoria Ivleva, a photo correspondent

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