It’s a Sunday, September 23rd, roughly 5 am. The sun is rising from above the vast, anonymous mountains I’m seeing from the 8th floor of a renovated room in the Alma-Ata hotel in Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan, currently the vivid cultural capital of the country. The number 7 issue of the Eurasia Kino magazine flips out from (yet another) festival bag that we were given upon arrival, and proudly announces that the Kazakh cinema is booming. This is really something to look forward to, as I have not been here since 2000, and the situation in the local film industry didn’t look very cheerful then at the time.
Gulnara Abikeeva, a film critic, editor-in-chief of the magazine as well as being the Artistic Director of the Eurasia IFF, mentions in her editorial twenty new Kazakh films produced this year, as opposed to five or six film productions made two years ago. Two of them were going to take part in the international competition, some others in the Competition of the Central Asian and Turkic Countries (a program which includes the former ex-Soviet Asian countries, and Turkic countries within Russia like Tatarstan and Bashkortostan – don’t worry if you hear this for the first time, I did too). I open up the festival catalogue and am pleasantly surprised by the improved quality.
My eyes are heavy and I desperately need some sleep before diving into the festival depths once again, but before that I really want to read more about the film I am very much looking forward to see – Shuga by one of the Kazakh New Wave masters Darezhan Omirbaev. I start reading the content and try to remember the original script that we read as an application for the Hubert Bals Fund some years ago, but I don’t get very far... a phone call wakes me up and a female voice that sounds remote invites me to join the official opening ceremony of the 4th Eurasia IFF.
In her editorial, Gulnara Abikeeva promises us, besides the current Kazakh film boom, some world-ranking film stars and some awarded films from Cannes, Tokyo, Moscow or Berlin. Next to the commercial Kazakh films though there is also a place for the art house cinema. Fortunately, as it was precisely because of a substantial number of auteur films in the late Eighties and in the Nineties, better known as the Kazakh New Wave, that Kazakh cinema gained its worldwide recognition. Is this a good time to discover a new New Kazakh Wave? I was going to check that out.
At one of the festival’s receptions which looked like an enormous Kazakh wedding, with multiple food courses and endless song-and-dance programs, I run into an old friend of the Rotterdam festival, Amir Karakulov. His film The Last Holidays won the VPRO Tiger Award in 1997, exactly ten years ago, in my first IFFR year. He, together with Darezhan Omirbaev and Serik Aprymov took up an important place at our festival’s programming as well as receiving support from the Hubert Bals Fund, and they have regularly come back ever since.
Amir invites me to see the rough cut of his new film Le Chin the next day. He is trying to finish it after a lot of effort and some problems, he says. We watch the rough cut in one of his offices (to make ends meet, he, like many other colleagues, runs his own advertisement company) together with the producer Behrooz Hashemian, and afterwards we discuss it with a cup of tea.
The film seems to me a natural continuation of the aesthetics of his previous film Jylama and, according to Amir Karakulov, this is his most important work until now. The most unique element of the film is the experiment of making it without a script, and only during the creative process of shooting. We finish right in time to catch the official screening of Shuga, the film by Darezhan Omirbaev inspired by Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and set in modern-day Kazakhstan. Unfortunately for all the foreign guests, there is no English subtitling. I can understand Russian, but some important texts are spoken in Kazakh, which makes it impossible to get the whole meaning of the film. What a pity! Nevertheless, I am very taken by the sensitive and emphatic set-up, and the impressive acting. The atmosphere throughout the film succeeds to join the ideas of the classic novel with the changed society in contemporary Kazakhstan. It is one of those films which encompasses you in one breath, and which makes you think for days after you first saw it. This is the wonderful side of my job.
The second Eurasian Market of the Film Projects might be the right place to meet the local film industry people. Here is a renewed encounter with the project Po barabanu by Eryan Rustembekov, that Nariman Turebayev, one of the co-writers of the script, mentioned to me two years ago, when he was in Rotterdam. The situation looks rough for the youngest generation of filmmakers, even though their creative energy and their enthusiasm are so intense that it rubs off on you. So here it is, a potential and new Kazakh new wave, young, modern and dynamic – a generation so much different from their predecessors, a generation that did not experience Soviet rule.
Young and boiling blood here is so eager to conquer the world outside – not only the youth from the film industry. Let’s hope that it is only a matter of time before they will get their chance and make their films. One of them I get to see soon enough: it’s the film Strizh by Abai Kulbai in the regional competition. It makes me think of the projects of his colleagues and gives a good indication of a new generation. It is a universal coming-of-age story of a tom-boyish Kazakh girl who struggles with her own identity, who lacks warmth at home, with divorced parents, an alcoholic stepfather, lack of understanding at school, and more. The film smartly reflects on the urban life of youth in Almaty. Formally it is close to the Kazakh documentary-feel style. The balanced acting of the main character and the equally balanced script make for an interesting debut.
At the closing ceremony I manage to meet some more people and friends, especially those who were so busy in their jury duties. One of them is Sergei Bodrov sr., whose Hollywood-style blockbuster Mongol I went to see in a regular cinema. People here really love it. He tells me that Guka Omarova is also in Kazakhstan – shooting her new film Baksy somewhere close to the Chinese border. The president of the jury, Ariel Rotter hopes to come to introduce his film El Otro in Rotterdam personally. As does another jury member, the Russian filmmaker and actress Larisa Sadilova. We are both thankful to Kazakhstan, which brought us together ten years ago, when our friendship begun. Larisa later won one of the Tiger Awards in 2002 with her film With Love, Lilya, and we will show the European premiere of her latest film, Nothing Personal, at the IFFR 2008. It received the FIPRESCI award in her native city Moscow, so now the international career of the film can start.
I don’t know exactly what it is, but, like two previous times, I experience having some troubles at the border whilst leaving the country. It seems so serious that they want to send me back from the airport at 4 a.m. and let me fly another day. When I’m really getting desperate, our French-Russian colleague Eugenie Zvonkine (co-writer of the Strizh script) comes to save me. What a relief to sit at the KLM plane back to Amsterdam, thank you so much Eugenie.