World Cinema Amsterdam 2014 screens 5 Kazakh movies

Five Kazakhstani movies are screened as part of Hello Kazakhstan! Programme at the World Cinema Amsterdam 2014 festival, Tengrinews reports.

The World Cinema Amsterdam is a summer film festival held in Amsterdam on August 14-24. The festival's main goal is to provide screening opportunities to independent films from Latin America, Asia and Africa.

The official trailer of the Festival:

Nine films from nine different countries will compete for the World Cinema Amsterdam Jury Award. In addition to the main prize, the winner will receive € 5,000 for his or her next film project. The prizewinner will be announced on Saturday, August 23.

The festival's audience decides on the World Cinema Amsterdam Audience Award and grants another € 5,000 cash prize to the winner. The winner will be unveiled on Monday 25.

Kazakh the Owners movie directed by Adilkhan Yerzhanov is one of nine nominees for the World Cinema Amsterdam Jury Award. 

Apart from being a nominee in the official competition, the film will be screened as part of out-of-competition Hello Kazakhstan! Programme.

The Owners film draws an absurd yet dramatic picture of two families fighting over a house. Two brothers who have a sickly little sister and the mother insane with grief on their hands are being evicted from their house by a local villager and his relative, a district policeman. But the brothers despite of not having any relatives to protect them are not willing to leave the house without a fight. 

The film was shot in Almaty Oblast, Kazakhstan. 

Yerzhanov’s film got into the Official Selection of the Cannes Festival and premiered in the Special Screenings of the 67th Cannes Film Festival. Earlier this month, The Owners entered the Contemporary World Cinema program of the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival. 

Here is the official trailer of The Owners:

Another four Kazakh movies that will be screened as part of Hello Kazakhstan! Programme are The Student, Adventure, Harmony Lessons and Constructors.

The Student movie directed by Darezhan Omirbayev is based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment novel. It was demonstrated in Un Certain Regard section of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and at the 34th Moscow International Film Festival. The movie also won the Special Jury Award at the Portugal Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival.  

The official trailer of The Student:

Nariman Torebayev's Adventure film is the third film project of Kazakh director based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's White Nights novel. 

Dreamy, shy and single Marat lives alone in the large city of Almaty and works as a security guard. His life is so boring, that each day is like a copy of the day before. However, one day his life changes when he meets a beautiful girl Mariyam, who is standing near his house looking for her beloved one, who went to the city with a promise to return once. He never did though. Marat's life is no longer predictable and boring, and finally gets some meaning: his friendship with Mariyam. Even more so, his life becomes an adventure: he is in love. Still, it is too good to be true.

The film premiered at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival last July. 

Here is the official trailer of Adventure:

Harmony Lessons of Kazakhstan's director Emir Baigazin tells the story of a 13-y.o. schoolboy named Aslan, who suffers indignity in front of his classmates and this starts a personality disorder in him. After that the boy starts to strain after cleanliness and perfection and becomes obsessed with controlling everything around him. But his relationships with the classmates and blackmailing keep getting worse.

This festival is not the first major international film event, where Harmony Lessons was presented. The film has participated in more than 60 film festivals and has won more than 25 awards. It won the Special Jury Prize for the Best Filmmaker’s Debut at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. It also won the Busboys and Poets First Feature Award at the 28th Washington International Film Festival.

The official trailer of Harmony Lessons:

Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s Constructors film tells the story of two teenagers and their younger sister who were evicted from their apartment due to rent arrears. They have no other option but to move onto the small family-owned land plot in the countryside. But the officials came claiming that all land without at least a house's foundation soon will be seized. The siblings ‘borrow’ equipment from neighbors and just in time, because no sooner they finish the foundation walls, the officials arrive.

It was screened at the Festivals in Busan (South Korea), GoEast Film Festival in Wiesbaden, and Edinburgh International Film Festival.

The official trailer of Constructors:

The Amsterdam film festival website said that the festival said that they brought together the Kazakh films that were considered a new generation of the Central Asian nation's film industry that surprised and shocked the world with its cinema language.

Well-organized Soviet film industry that was evacuated to Almaty, Kazakhstan during the World War II greatly boosted Kazakhstan's film industry so that towards the war’s end, almost 80 percent of Soviet films were shot in Kazakhstan. However, after Kazakhstan gained independence the Kazakh film industry went into a define because film budgets were small. 

"The past ten years, however, have brought a cautious change. Now we are even seeing commercial films made in Kazakhstan becoming domestic box-office hits - a trend that impacts on Kazakh independent cinema. This has led to the rise of a new generation of talented Kazakh filmmakers making art films that are remarkably often represented at the main European and Asian film festivals," the organisers wrote.

Here is how they described the Hello Kazakhstan! film selection: "Drawing on a rich cultural tradition, all these films give a razor-sharp analysis of Kazakhstan’s generally rather bleak status quo, but they also tell universal stories of people struggling with authorities and their arbitrary decisions, poverty and corruption, love and loss. In short, stories that portray the absurdity of life. Kazakh cinema is back!" 

Reporting by Aizhan Tugelbayeva, writing by Assel Satubaldina, editing by Tatyana Kuzmina