Starring: Askhat Kuchinchirekov, Tulepbergen Baisakalov, Ondasyn Besikbasov and Samal Yeslyamova
Director: Sergey Dvortsevoy
Rated: M
THIS film has received multiple awards. They include the Prix Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008, the Cannes Youth Prize, and its National Education Prize.
There is the first full-length feature for the film’s director.
The film has a simple narrative that illustrates beautifully the complex way of life in sparsely populated southern Kazakhstan in an area called Betpak Dala (Hunger Steppe), and it achieves the director’s stated goal of searching for the simplicity and warmth of the world through a mix of naturalism and poetry.
In the film, Asa (Askhat Kuchinchirekov) returns from the Navy to his family on the steppe where the environment dictates their way of life.
He works as apprentice to his sister’s (Samal Yeslyamova) shepherd husband Ondas (Ondasyn Besikbasov).
Coming from a family of shepherds, Asa wants a farm and a flock of sheep of his own, but he must first obtain a wife. Tulpan is his choice.
His friend Boni (Tulepbergen Baisakalov) urges him to give up the nomadic life and head for the city but Asa finally decides to stay, having learnt how difficult it is for his family to survive on the steppe.
The film teaches strong moral lessons in life – Asa learns, as we do, about the fragility of life, the power of Nature, the importance of family solidarity and the significance of looking for joy in life that can be sustained.
The story of the movie is simple, but it never loses its way under Dvortsevoy’s direction, and the film achieves a profound level of human intimacy.
Life is seen everywhere through the joyous play of children, the birth of animals and a family that knows it is doomed unless it stays together.
The film is an excellent mix of wry comedy, animal humour and environmental force. The landscape in the film seems entirely unsuitable for human living, but both humans and animals manage to survive.
One of the most comic scenes in the movie occurs when the local veterinarian arrives in a motorised scooter that has a sick, bandaged baby camel in its side-car, with the camel’s mother in mournful pursuit.
There is also an extraordinary sheep-birth scene where Dvortsevoy bridges the divide between animal and human to capture the sense of life emerging under threat in a place that is unique.
The director uses his ability to transform the scene into a miracle of birth.
This is a warm, human drama of life in a ruthless and unyielding terrain, where people endure and succeed.
The film embeds fiction into scenery with a powerful sense of place, and the movie comes together in a single artistic way that combines humans, animals and unforgiving terrain very well.
There are no computer effects in this film. Nature supplies all the special effects, and Jola Dylewska, who was responsible for the film’s cinematography, captures them brilliantly.
The life Asa finally chooses is hard, but it yields happiness and joy. As the movie progresses Asa grows in strength, and he shares many dreams.
Tulpan is the only marriageable person around and she is the one he wants to marry, but we only ever see glimpses of her behind drawn curtains and closed doors.
Asa has simply fallen in love with the idea of her and this is reflected provocatively by the film being named after someone, who is never really seen.
We know she rejects him, because his ears are too big, and she too yearns after the city-life, but most of all this is a moving coming-of-age story about a romantic who thinks he is in love, and who wants to become a farmer.
The film is helped by the fact that it uses locals working among the professional actors.
The director obviously took the time to wait for Nature to deliver its blows, and the combination of its power and natural, untrained acting lends the movie a strong degree of documentary realism.
This is a film that captures human persistence and endurance in an intense, but beguiling way.
It combines dry comedy and human drama, with unforgiving landscapes, to demonstrate that human beings can survive against almost impossible odds.
As a whole, the movie aims to charm, and it succeeds in doing that very well.
Peter W. Sheehan is an associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting.
