In 1993, when I attended the Istanbul International Film Festival for the Village Voice, I had the great surprise pleasure to come across this stunning little gem, Kairat, the first feature directed by the Kazakhstan filmmaker, Darezhan Omirbayev. The plot, such as it is, involves the misadventures of a young country student before and after he’s expelled from school in the capital city. But there is more to the film than that, and less.
At the time, Kazakhstan was just moving out of Russia’s orbit, and the liberal and secular Turkish government was featuring films in the festival from many Soviet states under the “Turkic republics” rubric. The hope was that if Turkey could welcome these Muslim-majority states into the liberal westernized world, they would not move towards fundamentalism and authoritarianism. Given Turkey’s descent in the years since, the irony of that plan, today, is potent.
At the time, though, Turkey was democratic, liberal and enlightened (at least comparatively so). The country’s leader mused that Kazakhstan might one day join its neighbor, and a great first step was through the Arty Little Movie. That leader, Turgut Ozal, did not even survive the film festival, and his dream died soon after he did.
At the time, I wrote,
“Kazakh films are now treated [in Turkey] as local product. Kairat [is] a deadpan tract on teen alienation. Kairat and Indira, the film’s stone-faced young lovers, wander aimlessly through their lives and past the country’s functional Communist architecture, shot in crisp black and white, with an aggressive lack of emotion. Lives are tremendously empty, sex absolutely dead, and all the characters endlessly crisscross the country in crowded, rickety trains. That could have made for tiresome film school avant-garde, but boredom has rarely been presented with such wit.” I predicted (presciently) that, for all the Kazakh films in the festival (which also included the excellent, utterly obscure Ultugan), “international prospects seem bleak, which is a shame. They present fresh, intriguing views of daily life in the USSR during its very last moments, and they deserve to be seen outside their little corner of the world.”
Since then, Darezhan Omirbayev has directed eight more films, including five full-length features, and won prestigious prizes at the Venice and Cannes film festivals for some of his French co-productions; New Yorker film critic named Omirbayev’s Anna Karenina adaptation, Chouga, number 11 on his list of the best films of the 21st century, so far. In the meantime, Kazakhstan has turned authoritarian and pro-Russian, and Turkey has turned fundamentalist and anti-democratic/authoritarian. Kairat, on the other hand, is still a great movie. Most things change; some things don’t.
An acceptably crisp copy of Kairat is currently streaming on the web. Maybe it’s been there for a long time, but I just found it, finally, after years of searching. Gosh, you should watch it.
^^^
Steven S. Drachman, who penned this review, writes regularly for Oblivioni. His reviews and feature articles have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly and many other places.