Waiting for the Sea (Russian: В ожидании моря; V ozhidanii morya) is a 2012 film by Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov with collaboration from Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Germany, France, and Belgium.

The film is set in the backdrop of the dried-up Aral Sea and addresses the impact of the ecological catastrophe on the fate of the people in that region.

[1] The second part of the trilogy, a tragicomedy named "Living Fish" (Живая рыба) after a screenplay by Oleg Antonov, had been projected since the year 2000,[2] but was never completed as a result of the financial crisis in 2008 and the deaths of producer Karl Baumgartner in 2014 and Khudojnazarov in 2015.

[6] Xan Brooks of theguardian.com rated it 3/5 stars and wrote, "Khudojnazarov's film is a big, broad, magical-realist folk tale, infested with too many crude archetypes (object of beauty, wise old hermit, roustabout best mate) to properly convince as human drama.

But if the acid test of an international film festival is its ability to show us places we never knew existed, to transport us to other worlds and unfamiliar cultures, then Waiting for the Sea must count as a roaring success.