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 The Kazakh film industry was a ship in the
night. It raised a few hopes, but now it’s vanishing.
At the end of the 1980s, cinema was the first cultural activity in Kazakhstan to
feel the currents of freedom that Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika had unleashed.
A dozen young filmmakers who had trained at Moscow’s prestigious VGIK film school
returned home in 1987, including Serik Aprimov, Darezhan Omirbayev, Amir Karakulov,
Talgat Temenov, all of whom would soon be winning prizes in major film festivals.
The story of the country’s film industry began with Rashid Nugmanov’s 1988 film The
Needle, which was a big hit all over the then Soviet Union and one of the first films
to break the taboo of talking about drug addiction. Next came Aprimov’s Terminus,
a film depicting the absurdity of daily life in a Kazakh village.
These films set a realist tone, and the works that followed–many of them autobiographical–claim
to follow in the tracks of France’s “new wave.” With their almost documentary styles
and ingenuous touches, these films gave directors the freedom to say exactly what
they felt.
The period after perestroika and then independence in 1991 proved quite a good time
for artists. Government continued to subsidize the film industry and more than 30
private studios sprang up. But most of these have since disappeared due to a lack
of cash. In 1994, Kazakhstan (with its 16 million inhabitants) turned out about a
dozen films. By 2000 this had fallen to only a handful.
Working conditions are tough, with no laws to encourage private film production,
old-fashioned studio equipment, virtually non-existent distribution networks and
a public with little money to spend on going to the cinema. Filmmakers have also
lost their prestige. The unity of style and subject of the early days has gradually
faded, and local films were quickly eclipsed by American imports.
Everyone has adjusted to the new situation in their own way. The luckiest filmmakers,
such as Omirbayev and Aprimov, have found foreign production partners–in France and
Japan–while others are making advertisements or mortgaging their apartments.
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