Tulpan - 08 August 2010

Principal cast: Askhat Kuchinchirekov, Tulepbergen Baisakalov, Samal Eslyamova

Film notes: An eager young Kazakh herdsman called Asa has just returned from naval service to his arid homeland. Beaming, he raises the flap on his sailor's shirt to show his life's dream, drawn in a naive hand under his collar: a traditional round-house, a sheep pen, a two-humped camel grazing, and a steaming goblet of tea, beneath a crescent moon and a yellow band of stars ... with a tornedo looming: "It's my dream to build a little corner of paradise like this. Under the starry skies of the Kazhak steppe". For Asa to receive the flock of sheep essential to founding his own life, he must marry. But the only available girl is Tulpan, and she thinks his ears are too big. Rejection spurs Asa onto a passionate, indirect courtship of Tulpan, always mediated by his dour brother-in-law and her unimpressed parents. The complexity of peasant life in this austere landscape shapes a gripping bigger picture around the story of an arranged marriage that is not easy to arrange. Custom and individual character, when not negotiating one another, have to tangle with the forces of nature, and with the no less dramatic lives of the animal species bound into the herdsmen's existence.

Director Sergey Dvortsevoy (Khlebny Dyen; Paradise) avoids the clichés associated with ethnographic cinema. Variety of characterization, cinematography that captures both intimacy and grandeur, and a thrilling life drama all combine to take this film way beyond "heart-warming". It achieves "a Tarkovsy-like majesty" (Variety). Tulpan won the award for "Un Certain Regard" at Cannes, and Best Film at the Tokyo and India International festivals, in 2008.