Beating Heart: Discovering the Cinema of Kyrgyzstan

While the last sunlight lingers on Ala-Too Square, the fourth edition of the Bishkek International Film Festival kicks off with a massive outdoor opening ceremony on highly symbolic ground in the heart of the Kyrgyz capital. A blue carpet runs out in front of the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic, on the square where crowds gathered as the Soviet Union came apart and, in the decades since, reconvened to ignite the revolutions of 2005, 2010 and 2020 that toppled a run of authoritarian presidents.

Under the watchful gaze of the hulking Vladimir Lenin statue that is the last of its kind in Central Asia, I hope the festival aims to shed its country’s soviet past, while honouring the legacy of Kyrgyz film auteurs from this bygone epoch. The crowd around me is an already appropriate mix of old and young, with screen icon Dogdurbek Kydyraliev, a grizzled actor of Soviet-era Kyrgyz historical epics and this year’s Honorary Award recipient, flanked by the region’s emerging talents. However, the top-down nature of the ceremony – overflowing with ambitiously staged musical numbers and lengthy governmental speeches about the festival’s mandate to put Kyrgyz cinema on the world map – seems slightly worrying at first. Had I unknowingly wandered into one of those state events that cynically deploy culture as a tool of soft power? Fortunately, the following days proved quite the opposite, as I immersed myself in the hub of a zealous film community intent on building a robust cinema culture from the ground up.

Young film professionals from Kyrgyzstan and neighbouring countries now flock to Bishkek for a festival that, within four years, has undergone nothing less than a meteoric rise. Recalling Bishkek IFF’s humble beginnings, Sultan Usuvaliev, programmer of the Central Asian Competition, tells me how the retrospective programmes he curated for the first three editions ​“were held in the twenty-eight-seat hall of the Manas cinema theatre.“ Its subsequent growth, and its move to a multiplex in the city’s Asia Mall, came ​“thanks to the appearance of the national cinema section Kyrgyz Box, alongside a growing number of international guests, plus an industry-oriented work-in-progress programme.“ Coinciding with the decline of once-prestigious festivals in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, Usuvaliev confirms that Bishkek IFF has now grown into ​“the most important film festival of the region.“

With nine titles sourced from almost every Central Asian country, Usuvaliev’s section straddles audience-friendly genre fare and more arthouse-leaning dramas, a fair cross-section of the region’s output. He sees the festival’s infrastructure as a way to deepen the collective understanding of what Central Asian cinema currently stands for, which is why, behind the official title of competition programmer, his role is really a Trojan horse for something far larger. ​“The Central Asian Competition,“ he explains, ​“is the continuation of my work as a film scholar.“ He compares the intersection of his academic and curatorial jobs to the way video-game designers draw the map for the worlds they build: ​“Where is the river, the ocean, the castle? You need to give the world texture and draw an entirely new map, layer by layer.“

And because a map is no use without anyone to read it, he dedicates the rest of his time to the birth of new film publication Synchy (Kyrgyz for ​‘critic‘), a training ground for a growing cohort of young Kyrgyz critics. His co-founder and managing editor is Tynystan Temirzhan, a hyper-ambitious 28-year-old known in the city as the filmmaker spearheading Bishkek’s budding film community. ​“In the first place, I am a director,“ Temirzhan tells me after the festival wraps. ​“But we need good criticism, which no one was doing.“ Usuvaliev and Temirzhan now raise a new generation of writers that critically engage with their national cinema, sometimes irking older Kyrgyz filmmakers unused to analytical reviews, while also challenging the state-sponsored film industry, for instance by running a column on censorship in Kyrgyz film.

“Synchy is useful for me,“ Temirzhan explains. ​“When I’m not making a film, I can still engage with cinema and grow our critics’ community.“ Where he finds the time to run and write for the publication is a mystery, given the fact he is also a highly prolific filmmaker in his region. As co-founder of the grassroots film collective Tartaly, he works alongside a group of roughly ten young directors who take a radically DIY approach to documentary. After self-funding his graduation film Romeo with a bank loan, Temirzhan realised he ​“couldn’t afford that risk again. It’s the reason my friends and I started to make no-budget experimental works, an initiative out of which Tartaly grew.“

Frustrated with the quality of their film education at Kyrgyz-Turkish Manas University and a broader lack of funding for emerging talent, Tartaly continued the cinema expeditions that Aibek Dairbekov, Bishkek IFF’s current artistic director, once organised to the rural corners of Kyrgyzstan. They picked up that baton and set up their own field trips, resulting in a stream of non-fiction shorts, some of them compiled on their YouTube channel. ​“It’s all about improvisation,“ Temirzhan says of the movement. ​“Only during the trip do we find our subject, our characters, and the form in which we’re going to tell the story.“

This joint operation has already produced 200 films, with one productive year even netting fifty shorts, of which Temirzhan admits ​“only a handful are good. We also produce a lot of shit, which is okay, as we simply enjoy making films together.“ The group regularly gathered to watch the shorts, discuss them, and choose the location of the next trip. And while the frequency of these expeditions has dropped, Tartaly’s ethos stands strong: ​“the collectivised spirit of building a local cinema.“ They already have their share of success stories: Temirzhan’s The Green Field (2022), shot in just four hours, had a strong festival run that, alongside his graduation short, earned him a place at Locarno’s prestigious Filmmakers’ Academy. At home, Tartaly’s films also find avid viewers, notably academics who praise the collective for the way its ethnographic work cinematically maps present-day rural Kyrgyzstan.

“We love our independence,“ says Temirzhan, who is careful to scale up Tartaly and would rather see the collective become a proper film school for other emerging talent. ​“We don’t have ambitions like changing Kyrgyz cinema or making new history,“ he continues. ​“Tartaly is never about the result, only about the process.“ This is where he and Usuvaliev somewhat diverge, as the programmer and scholar does dream of a more unified, robust Central Asian film community. ​“We are different cultures, with different languages, cultural codes and industry rules, but I want us to speak with one voice, to think of ourselves as one creative hub.“ The word he ultimately lands on is co-presence, in contrast to ​“a unity that erases diversity.”

With a flourishing festival, a fresh critical outlet and an ever-growing body of independent films, Usuvaliev and Temirzhan have laid the groundwork for Kyrgyzstan’s forward-facing film culture. ​“Can we already construct a new film wave out of that? I think not,“ Usuvaliev admits, but he sees how the ripples already spread across the pond. Temirzhan, for his part, is not sure what the future will hold for his collective, while remaining adamant on investing time in directing and expanding Kyrgyz film criticism. The gradual expansion of this local film ecology is entirely the point: the region’s place in world cinema is being drawn less in the aplomb of Bishkek IFF’s opening ceremony than in the patient labour of a handful of filmmakers, scholars and critics, who write the new chapter of Kyrgyz cinema on their own terms.