Centaur

In a mountain village outside Bishkek, a quiet man nicknamed Centaur makes his living as a cinema projectionist, and when he starts taking horses at night the whole town turns to look at him. The animal he goes after this time is the prized racehorse of one of the district’s powerful men. Centaur believes the Kyrgyz descend from horse-men and that horses are the wings of humankind; what he does is not theft to him but an attempt to restore a connection that has been cut. Aktan Arym Kubat tells it not as a crime story but as the story of a village caught between faith and superstition, tradition and the present, and he plays the lead himself. It is a Kyrgyz, French, German and Dutch co-production, shown in the Panorama section of the 2017 Berlinale, where it won the CICAE award. Sources also give the director’s name as Aktan Abdykalykov.