In my attempts to keep exploring unknown film territory and continue championing world cinema, the turn has come to Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan is a post Soviet nation consisting of many ethnic groups and cultures, on its way to strengthen its cultural identity. Cinema has an important contribution in highlighting Kazakhstan’s particular challenges and opportunities by telling its stories; though those stories press for change and the building of a new identity. Their films offer us an opportunity to observe and learn from both the good and bad of their historical journey.

The Festival of Central and Eastern European Film, also known as goEast, Wiesbaden-based and organised by the Deutsches Filminstitut, plays a key role in bringing more of their films to the attention of a larger community of film lovers. This year’s goEast, the 21st was opened with the film Yellow Cat by the Kazakhstan director Adlikhan Yerzhanov. Also among the 9 fiction films shown there was his film Ulbolsyn (2020). Yerzhanov has been a Cannes Festival invitee twice, where he made his debut with his third film The Owners in 2014, followed by The Gentle Indifference of the World in 2018. His 2020 film Yellow Cat was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 2020.

My entry into the work of Adlikhan Yerzhanov was The Owners and it has been impossible not to keep thinking about this film in the past week or two.

The Owners portrays a remote village in Kazakhstan, its harsh realities and its fragility, both economically and relationally. Three siblings enter the village in the hope to make a new start. The youngest, a 12-year old girl, is suffering from epilepsy. They lived in the city with their now departed mother and there is no future for them there. Their mother has left behind a shack in this village where the wildness of nature is resembled in its societal realities.

They soon run into troubles when the cottage is claimed by an alcoholic, local squatter, who happens to be the brother of the police chief. After being beaten up, the oldest of the three ends up in prison and all legal complaints lead to nothing and only cause more violence and oppression. Corruption, nepotism and injustice are rampant. They become an example of a little group of individuals that literally no one cares about. No one in the village is willing to do anything for their benefit, drowned as they are in the messiness of their own situation. They are a call to to us, that in every society there are individuals and groups no one cares about, people who don’t deserve this in any way, but find themselves marginalised and forgotten.

Yerzhanov talked in an interview about

“the thing that really makes filmmaking worth the effort is a sort of faith in something good, some kind of deep-rooted and hidden humanity’
‘there is still, somewhere, this quixotic feeling that there must be some kind of justice in the world, some kind of utopian ideal.”

In a very original and at times fantastical way, Yerzhanov confronts us with the weird and harsh realities of his country, in which this faith needs to be upheld. We can rally at his side by paying attention to his story!

Rinus, June 2021

*image posted under ‘fair use’ of copyright material in recommendation of the film