Schizo

Mustafa, fifteen years old, is called Schizo. His mother’s boyfriend puts him to work finding fighters for illegal bare knuckle bouts. His life changes for good when a young man beaten badly in one of those fights asks him to take the prize money to his girlfriend and small son; Schizo delivers it as promised and falls in love with the woman. From then on he knows who he is earning for, and he stops counting what it costs him. Gulshat Omarova’s first feature looks at the illegal fighting circuit in rural Kazakhstan from inside it, from a screenplay she wrote with Sergei Bodrov, who also produced. It screened in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 2004.