Festival closing: Darezhan Omirbayev Double-Bill: The Road (Kazakhstan, 2001)

Kazakh film critic and scholar Gulnara Abikeyeva considers The Road — Darezhan Omirbayev’s metacinematic reflection on the painful anxieties and self-aggrandizing delusions of film directing — to be the last film of the Kazakh New Wave. Its protagonist Amir Kobessov (played by famous Tajik director Jamshed Usmonov) is an acclaimed art cinema director and an unfaithful, lying husband who finds out about his mother’s illness and drives to visit her in rural Kazakhstan. On the long road, he daydreams about his failures, fears, and longings encountering a set of surreal characters in the blurry space between dream and reality. The Road is a mixture of a road-movie and a film about film (many compare it to Fellini’s 8 1/2), and its main character — a darker mirror-image of Omirbayev himself, discombobulated by the unexpected success of his latest feature, Killer.

Samizdat is supported by Film Hub Scotland, part of the BFI’s Film Audience Network, and funded by Screen Scotland and National Lottery funding from the BFI.

Accessibility

English subtitles, SDH captions

Financial support to attend the festival is available to eligible applicants via Samizdat's Access Fund.

Content notes: Content notes: sex, partial nudity, sexual harassment.