For the last 10 years young filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov has been developing a coherent and exciting body of work, that shakes up Kazakhstan's production, and has imposed himself as a heir to its short lived New Wave (initiated notably by Rachid Nougmanov's The Needle, presented here two years ago). Born in 1982, Yerzhanov obtains his diploma from the Kazakhstan National Academy of Arts in 2009 and immediately tries to rattle his country's social and cinematographic values. After Realtors, a first unconventional film, along with Serik Abishev and a few other filmmakers, he gives birth to Cinema Partisan, a cinematographic dogma that refuses state subsidies and is not afraid to address subversive issues.
And if, from Constructors and its remake The Owners, from The Plague at Karatas Village or the mysterious Night God, up to his recent The Gentle Indifference of the World, formal common points (decrepit walls, buzzing TVs, the color yellow, dancing figures, pictorial references) and thematic ones (police and orwellian administration, violence, family), are obsessively present in all his films, don't be fooled. Far from repeating itself, Yerzhanov's cinema works like a puzzle universe and can be appreciated as a whole, with its incessant re-interpretation and re-invention. How better to grasp this than by a presentation of all his feature films, (including his surprising documentary on Kazakh cinema) ?
