The Kazakh film canon.

Darezhan Omirbayev · Kazakhstan

A minimalist, Bressonian portrait of two brothers and a small crime in modern Kazakhstan.

Adilkhan Yerzhanov · Kazakhstan

A woman searches for her abducted son across a lawless steppe — accompanied by a violent stranger she cannot trust.

Askhat Kuchinchirekov · Kazakhstan

Raised by his grandmother under the Kazakh tradition of bauryna salu, a boy must return to parents he barely knows.

Adilkhan Yerzhanov · Kazakhstan / Russia

A meek man enters the world of the warlord who killed his wife — and becomes his right hand.

Bolat Kalymbetov · Kazakhstan

The life of poet Mukagali Makatayev — a portrait of Soviet-era Almaty and the price of an honest verse.

Adilkhan Yerzhanov · Kazakhstan / France

An ex-con dreams of opening a cinema in the steppe with the woman he loves — a stylised tribute to Melville and the French New Wave.

Adilkhan Yerzhanov · Kazakhstan

A penniless young man follows the woman he loves to the city to settle her family's debt — a painterly, deadpan modern western.

Sergey Dvortsevoy · Kazakhstan / Russia

A Kyrgyz migrant in Moscow abandons her newborn and tries to outrun debt, cold and bureaucracy in a single relentless week.

Emir Baigazin · Kazakhstan / Germany / France

Four boys come of age in the steppe in the chaotic early 1990s — a quiet, painterly portrait of post-Soviet adolescence.

Akan Satayev · Kazakhstan

A son and mother are torn apart across seven decades of Kazakh history — famine, war, exile and the search for home.

Emir Baigazin · Kazakhstan / Germany / France

A bullied teenager in a rural Kazakh school descends into a private, ritualistic world of revenge.

Sergey Dvortsevoy · Kazakhstan

A young sailor returns to the Kazakh steppe and tries to win the hand of the only marriageable girl for hundreds of kilometres.