BOPEM

As a child, Rayan used to love taking walks along the Aral Sea with his mother and watching the ships go by, until their last fateful outing, when his mother was struck by a car and died – with her death the sea began to disappear drop by drop until all that remained was a dusty desert. Now Rayan is 14 and as desolate inside as his arid surroundings. He spends his days alone aboard a rusty shipwreck with his memories of his mother or hanging around with his rowdy friends, who don’t know exactly what to do with their energy and their dreams either. Everything changes for Rayan though when a visit to the doctor reveals that he only has three months left to live. An operation could save his life, but there’s no way he could ever manage to scrape together the necessary funds, so he resolves to use the time that he has left wisely – to seek revenge on the police officer who ran over his mother, and on his father, who allowed himself to be bribed into silence back then. BOPEM simultaneously paints an impressive portrait of a lost stretch of land in Kazakhstan, which has become the scene of an economic and ecological catastrophe, and of a generation of teenagers, robbed both of their internal sense of direction and external perspectives, for whom violence represents the only means of coping with reality.