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Exclusive: Writer-director Aysulu Onaran (Balaban) has wrapped principal photography on her latest feature film, Rebirth Island. The film is a historical spy thriller based on true events from the Cold War.

Executive producers on the pic are Rose Ganguzza (Fatima) and Adilet Yessimov (Balaban). The film was shot on location in Kazakhstan. Onaran will present the project to buyers at EFM.

The film’s synopsis reads: It’s summer 1992, a month before the collapse of the Soviet empire. A military scientist, Colonel Dautov, serves at the top-secret laboratory on Rebirth Island. The Colonel’s beliefs and military oath are challenged when he rescues an imprisoned woman from the laboratory and helps a CIA agent to find the secret burial ground of 200 tons of the bioweapon Anthrax-836 to avert the biological apocalypse.

Dulyga Akmolda, Vlad Bukatkin, Malika Baygubenova, Olga Landina, and Alexey Shemes star in the film. Additional credits include Director...

Cumbersome title aside, “The Horse Thieves: Roads of Time” represents . This highly unusual co-production, co-directed by Kazakh filmmaker Yerlan Nurmukhambetov (“Walnut Tree”) and rising Japanese director Lisa Takeba, feels honest to the point of naïve, marked by a gentle pace, with only the widescreen vistas of dusty red hills backdropped by sharply sculpted white mountains, and a late swerve into Western genre territory, lending this small-scale tale its epic dimensions.

Representing as it does a collaboration that straddles the entire region, it is perhaps a pity that the film itself is not a little more bombastic, as well as a surprise that this hybridization of different cinematic traditions does not yield something more multi-layered. Instead, even given the presence of Samal Yesyamova, Cannes Best Actress winner for 2018’s “Ayka,” “Horse Thieves” is heartfelt but a little too straightforward to feel anything but minor, just like the key in which its sad-eyed drama plays.

“A home country is a paradise.”

Oralman is the official term for ethnic Kazakhs who have returned to their home country after it became independent in 1991. Under Soviet rule in the 1930s, individuals and families had to leave Kazakhstan for the neighboring states. The combination of repression as well as unbearable conditions such as famines made life difficult in the country and many people had to face the choice of leaving their homes. According to author Almaz Kumenov the Kazakh state officially asked its former citizens to return due to the “demographic collapse” of the country, but also because the number of ethnic Kazakhs still living there was so low.

Consequently, many former refugees returned to Kazakhstan, hoping to regain their roots and their home. According to statistics from 2015, almost one millions oralman have immigrated to Kazakhstan defining a small, but growing part of the population. However, their return was...