Akyn
Poet
Poets have always been untrustworthy, since time began. The indeterminacy of the meanings they produce, the unproductive nature of their verses, the awareness required to translate a sensitive experience into words goes against the grain of our world. This is Omirbayev’s view, as also expressed by how he makes the protagonist of his film a poet who earns his living as a journalist in Almaty, barely allowing him to exercise his talent. Omirbayev connects him to the tempestuous nature of his calling by evoking the nineteenth-century poet Makhambet Otemisuly, whose terrible fate is a comment on the place of poets in the current social order and adds a secondary story to the main one. Omirbayev’s usual mastery of juxtaposing unannounced dream sequences with unorthodox flashbacks, as if memory and dream were contiguous, give poetic color to the progression of the story, which reaches its high point when the poet travels to give a lecture in a distant city. What takes place with one of the members of the audience is a small materialist miracle – within the film and extending outside it – whose counterpart is a lucid nightmare that involves a dozen screens, a moment of clairvoyance in which the misfortune of an audiovisual culture dissociated from writing is revealed. (Roger Koza)
In the presence of Darezhan Omirbayev and Yuliya Kim (production).
Darezhan Omirbayev: ZHIZN (1982, K), JULY (1988, K), KAIRAT (1992), KARDIOGRAMMA (1995), KILLER (1998), THE ROAD (2001), CHOUGA (2007), STUDENT (2012)
- Yerdos Kanayev
- Serik Salkinbayev
- Klara Kabylgazina
- Gulmira Khasanova
- Bolat Shanin
- Aida Abdurakhman
- Darezhan Omirbayev
- Boris Troshev
- Alexander Vlaznev
- Gulyaim Kozhamberdiyeva
- Alexandr Rorokin
East Wind Production