Kazakh film should be worth $340,000 to be profitable

Film director Timur Kasymzhanov said that a Kazakh film can break even and bring profit only if the expenses to make it don't exceed $340,000. He said this at the meeting of the club of Polytechnical Decisions Institute, Tengrinews.kz reports. The author of a Kazakh comic movieSuperBaha said that a Kazakh film can actually make 100 million tenge ($673,000). There are some exclusions, Likvidator of Akhan Satayev collected 180 million tenge ($1,200,000), for example. Kasymzhanov mentioned that film distributors get half of the box office takings, that is why it is more profitable to work with smaller budgets. Kasymzhanov thinks that lack of trust of Kazakh audience to home-made films is one of the reasons for small profits and there aren’t many good film-makers in Kazakhstan, that is the other reason. In his opinion low interest to Kazakh movies is also related to the financial crisis when people are tring to save money. The director considers that Kazakh film-makers must learn to work with small budgets and raise quantity and quality of the films they release. As an example he pointed at Uzbekistan’s experience where 80 films are released annually.