REBIRTH ISLAND

KALADAN KELGEN KYZ tells the story of a boy growing up in the early 60s in a small village on the Aral Sea who falls in love with the daughter of a functionary from the city. But the strictly enforced communist system in the village has no place for inappropriate feelings and poems, for privacy or the arts. As a counterpoint, literature plays an independent role in the film, which is dominated by voice-overs. Recordings of the director’s father, the poet Zaraskan Abdrašov – famous in Kazakhstan and often censored – fill the soundtrack. He reads the autobiographical elegy that inspired the film. Rustem Abdrašov sees this film as an “intellectual dialogue” with his father and his life-story. The film shows us images of Kazakhstan’s barren and sand-filled vastness, the glittering lake, camels and fishing-huts in sepia tones, while colour is used to show the emergence of the boy’s physical longings. The unequal couple’s shy liaison leads to an uproar and moral indignation in the multi-ethnic society of the village. Facing the headmaster’s tribunal, the boy commits treason against his own feelings. There is nothing left to do but leave the place of his youth. Located between educational novel and classic coming-of-age story, the film also tells us about the beginning modernisation of this remote landscape: about photography and radio, automobiles and the first man in space.