Cardiogram

A twelve year old boy is growing up on the steppe. A treatable problem is found with his heart. His mother sends him to a children’s clinic in the capital. He is to stay there for a month. This is his first meeting with the world outside. Everyone at the clinic speaks Russian. The boy speaks Kazakh. He stays on the edge of things because he cannot follow them. He becomes a foreigner in his own country. Meanwhile he falls in love for the first time, with a young nurse. The feeling turns into an obsession before long. The film tells this quietly and without going into detail. It competed at Venice in 1995. It took a UNESCO prize there. Zhasulan Asauov and Gulnara Dusmatova appear in the seventy six minute film, a Kazakh production Darezhan Omirbayev finished in 1995.