A peculiar yet striking architectural form—“The Sun” heliocomplex—features in the opening shots of Uzbek artist and filmmaker Saodat Ismailova’s 18,000 Worlds (2023). Perhaps like no other building in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, it crystallizes the political, cultural, and economic will which animated the Central Asian city for nearly half a century; a hallmark of the Soviet Union’s postwar ambition for a modern socialist alternative to the capitalist West. In 18,000 Worlds, “The Sun” heliocomplex  is juxtaposed with the traditional rooftops of the ancient Silk Road city of Bukhara, while archival footage from an early 1920s documentary reveals Soviet maps of Central Asia previously used for national territorial delimitation. The contrasting traditions evoked by the variety of images in the film—from the blue mosaic domes of Persian influence to the depictions of cosmonauts, signifying traces of the mid-20th-century Space Race that unfolded in the Central Asian region—expose the multitude of contradictions encapsulated by archives and cultural heritage.