User reviews

A naive and idealistic young man with no future run into the vast and beautiful, but oppressive and locking-in kazakh steppe. Life might be a movie, but there are places where you can not get a cinema.

Nevertheless this movie made it. Just as vast yet minimal, beautiful yet absurd, comic yet tragic, as the world itself this movie is revealing to us.

Rarely do I root for a character to succeed as much as I was rooting for Kermek to fulfill his dream of building a movie theatre in the middle of nowhere.

The movie blends escapism and reality, as well as humor and tragedy. It offers some of the most memorable sequences I've seen in a long time, and it achieves that while being as minimal as it gets. There are almost no sets, little dialogue, we don't get to know much about any of the characters and, even though there is a plot and it develops in a linear way, that's not what really drives the movie. It's all about watching Kermek and Eva's journey, as they strive to build a cinema and, by extension a better world for them, unfazed by the bleak reality that everyone and everything around them adheres to. It's a slow journey, but it's worth it, for the aftertaste it leaves. I enjoyed every bit of it and it really stands out from everything else I've seen this year.

This film is masterful at achieving a perfect balance of humour and tragedy.

A minimalist jewel of a story.