Kairat

A young man living in Almaty is training to become a bus conductor. He walks the streets, goes to the cinema and one day meets a student. That is very nearly the whole of it; the film keeps speech to a minimum and builds the quiet erosion of moving from the provinces to the city out of images instead. Darezhan Omirbayev’s first feature took the Silver Leopard and the FIPRESCI prize at Locarno, the Silver Montgolfiere at Nantes, and in 1993 the Grand Prix and the critics’ prize at Strasbourg. The seventy-two minute film is generally treated as the start of the Kazakh New Wave. Kairat Makhmetov plays the lead.