In “The Desert of Forbidden Art,” documentary filmmakers Tchavdar Georgiev and Amanda Pope tell a story of an ordinary man, a failure at his original aspiration but an incredible success later in life. Almost single-handedly he created a cultural oasis in a real desert of Ubekistan when the oppression of the Soviet Union was drying up the creativity. Art was endangered and one man devoted his life to saving it.

It took six years for the co-directors of this fascinating documentry to capture the work and life of Igor Savitsky, a failed artist himself who described finding these treasures “rolled up under the beds of old widows, buried in family trash, in dark corners of artists’ studios, sometimes even patching a hole in the roof.”

In his lifetime, Savitsky would acquire 44,000 works of art by people such as Alexander Volkov, Ural Tansykbayev, Victor Ufimtsev, Kliment Red’ko and Robert Falk. Savitsky was born in Kiev in 1915 and died in 1984. He was part of an archeological expedition to the Karakalpakstan and would later move to its capital, Nukus. There, from 1957-1966, he collected Karakalpak ethnic arts and crafts, jewelry, clothing, coins and carpets. After establishing a museum and becoming the curator, he began collection the works of Central Asian artists, and later, Russian avant-garde and post avante-gard paintings. Young Russian artists had considered the remote desert areas of Ubekistan as exotic in almost the same way as Paul Gaugiun had found Tahiti.

Like Savitsky, Georgiev and Pope had to do a lot of digging, The artists were dead. Savitsky was also long dead. That left only the children and friends along with some archival footage to tell this story. Even second-hand, the story is a fascinating journey and a testiment of how one man, one person can truly change the world and create something phenomenal.

The museum in Nukus first came to the attention of the outside world when Stephen Kinzer, the former chief of the New York Times Central Asian bureau wrote about it.

Yet if this art was once endangered due to the repression of Stalin, now the museum and the treasures it houses is endangered from lack of funding. The question becomes can this little museum on the edge of nowhere keep this museum and its full collection together? Just last year, a movie called “The Art of the Steal,” showed that sometimes small towns lose out to bigger cities with big pockets and lawyers as seems to have been the case with the Barnes Foundation collection.

Georgiev and Pope and their documentary about Igor Savitsky clearly show that one person can make a difference. If Igor Savitsky could create an oasis of culture in the desert despite Stalinism, what can each of us create in this little paradise called Southern California?