CHOUGA Showcase Kazakhstan

Since winning prizes for KAIRAT( Silver Leopard, Venice 1992) and KILLER (Un Certain Regard Prize, Cannes, 1998), Darezhan Omirbaev has served as the inspirational center of Kazakhstan’s resurgent cinema . With this loose adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, he demonstrates the versatility, psychological insights, formal innovation and skill with actors that have made him a major figure on the international film scene. The beautiful Chouga is in an unsatisfying marriage to a politician and mover and shaker in their city’s explosive new economy. When she returns home for a family crisis, she meets the young Ablai, a casually passionate young member of an emerging upper class. The two fall for each other, leaving Chouga with tough decisions to make. Though the story follows the well-worn tracks of traditional melodrama, Omirbaev considers the entire affair with a careful, distanced gaze, allowing the actors to carry the weight of the story with their faces and gestures. Much of the action takes place off-screen, allowing us to see more or less what the characters see. The lack of narrative manipulations, however, doesn’t make CHOUGA an emotionally detached film. Instead, we are invited into Chouga’s world, experiencing the same senses of distance, of confusion, of awkward quietude, of passion that she does. Delicate, poignant and masterfully paced, this is the work of an artist in full control of his medium.