News

While the war in Ukraine has upended global geopolitics and ratcheted up tensions between Russia and the West, the impact has been especially profound across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where many inhabitants have themselves been the victims of Moscow’s aggression in the past.

In Kazakhstan, which shares the world’s longest land border with Putin’s rogue state and was the last of the former Soviet republics to achieve independence, the past two years have not only seen the disruption of traditional political and economic ties but accelerated a process of uncoupling from Russian language and culture.

Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “the young generation started to be more aware and be more awake and passionate about [Kazakh] culture itself,” says 26-year-old filmmaker Aisultan Seitov, whose feature debut, “Qas” (Hunger), about the brutal Kazakh famine of the 1930s, won best director honors in the Asian New Talent...

The literal translation of Kazakhstan is “Land of the Wanderers” – reflecting the nomadic origins of the Kazakh people – and if the folks behind the soon-to-be-launched Almaty Film Festival have their way it’ll become the destination of choice in Central Asia for itinerant international producers seeking a partner in the region for their projects, or dramatic locations for their shoots. The first edition of the festival will run Sept. 15-19.

The land-locked country, sandwiched between China and Russia, has a modest population, 18.6 million, in relation to its huge size – almost four times the area of Texas. Contained within that vast space are a variety of natural terrain – predominantly grassland plains, the Steppe, but also the Altai Mountain in the East, deserts in the South, lakes and inland seas, like Caspian and Aral, forests and canyons.

For the past two decades the capital has been Astana, but before that it was Almaty,...