The Sky of My Childhood
A new film about the childhood of the president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, premiered in Astana recently. The Sky of My Childhood.
According to a review by Eurasianet, the film does portray little Sultan (as Nazarbayev is called by friends and families) as a happy child with a strong and caring family, doing genuine Kazkh things like hunting with falcons, riding horses, and playing the dombro. It also includes a scene where Sultan builds a city out of stones, foreshadowing the construction of Astana.
However it also does look at some of the more serious historical events that shaped the Kazakh SSR at the time, such as the Great Patriotic War, the forced deportation of Chechnyans and other Caucus peoples to Kazakhstan, and forced collectivization of the Kazakh nomads.
I’ll probably wait for it to come out on DVD on the off-chance it has English subtitles, or at least so I can replay bits I don’t get the first time, but it is playing in theaters in Kazakhstan now.
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Have you had a chance to see this movie yet? Any ideas how I could find a copy?
No idea if it’ll be released outside Kazakhstan on DVD. I haven’t seen it, but a friend did and said it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t over the top on the propaganda front. But then it didn’t have to be, did it?
So it turns out there’s a Kazakhstan Film Festival here in London, and I went to see the film today.
It wasn’t a terrible production, and I feel like I got a glimpse into some culturally Kazakh themes and mindsets, but I feel like there wasn’t much of storytelling either. There wasn’t a lot of emotional buildup, or frankly, any situations that called for it. To be honest, I feel like Nazarbayev’s childhood was pretty darn boring and uneventful – not sure if it’s really a story worth telling.
The reception seemed pretty good (I think I might have been the only non Kazakh in the theatre), though I had a hard time understanding why scenes like that of Nazarbayev reciting a “poem” in class about a guy ogling a girl and going back to his empty house, is deemed a knee slapping comedic moment. Or why every time there’s a closeup of Nazarbayev as a kid warranted the entire audience to let out a loud “awwww” in unison (every single time). Or why when the credits rolled, everyone stood up and started clapping…
I’ll have to say that I don’t know enough about they Kazakh psyche to really appreciate or understand this movie. I suppose Nazarbayev is someone that people really look up to, and given that context, the reactions make sense.
Oh, and the subtitles were pretty hilarious. It was a blend of colloquialisms that’s even too colloquial for cartoon subtitling, with what seemed like Shakespearean English “lest he be ill…on my behest…”
I’d like to hear your thoughts, as an American who knows the culture.
The reaction sounds about right. And it shows how strong the cult of personality is. Watching him make toast would elicit applause. For reference, when we watched the film Nomads in the theater, people stood up and applauded at the beginning because they showed a quote from the president! Even his words deserve applause. I did hear one friend say it was a bit odd that they showed the president as a baby naked.
From what I was told, a lot of the scenes are designed to foreshadow current policies. Like isn’t there some scene where he builds a “city” out of rocks, which shows that someday he will build Astana, the new capital? So maybe you have to be familiar with his policies from the past 20 years to find it interesting. But I think that if they heard a foreigner thought it was just boring, they would go nuts.