‘Unchained’ From Putin’s Russia, Kazakh Cinema Finds a Fresh Voice in Generation of Bold, Emerging Talents
variety.comChristopher Vourlias While the war in Ukraine has upended global geopolitics and ratcheted up tensions between Russia and the West, the impact has been especially profound across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where many inhabitants have themselves been the victims of Moscow’s aggression in the past.
In Kazakhstan, which shares the world’s longest land border with Putin’s rogue state and was the last of the former Soviet republics to achieve independence, the past two years have not only seen the disruption of traditional political and economic ties but accelerated a process of uncoupling from Russian language and culture.
Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “the young generation started to be more aware and be more awake and passionate about [Kazakh] culture itself,” says 26-year-old filmmaker Aisultan Seitov, whose feature debut, “Qas” (Hunger), about the brutal Kazakh famine of the 1930s, won best director honors in the Asian New Talent section of this year’s Shanghai Film Festival.
Now, he adds, “it’s a different world,” as Kazakhstan is increasingly “unlinked — unchained — from Russian media, from Russian music, from a lot of Russian content.” As in its neighboring Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan’s film industry during the Soviet era was tightly controlled by Moscow, which set quotas for the number of films produced in each republic and underwrote the financing, promotion and distribution of movies.
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