Cardiogram

I've seen all three of Omirbaev's movies, and this was my first, a beautiful, delicately poetic movie about a young boy with a weak heart sent to a sanitorium in Kazakhstan, during the Soviet era. The movie is a good, nicely drawn portrait of the drabness of the Soviet years, of being poor (and Asian) in the flattest countryside imaginable, and of the crushing monotony of a state-run institution. It's a poetically precise movie with subtle injections of humor and strikingly beautiful imagery (Omirbaev has an exquisite eye), a carefully drawn story of sexual awakening and an affirmation of the power of art. Like every other Kazakh film I've seen, KARDIOGRAMMA was shot on a pretty unstable color stock, but it gives the movie a very interesting look. And the performance by the boy who plays the lead is very good.

In a Russian hospital in Kazakhstan, a young farmer with a heart illness suffers the taunts of his friends and experiences his first amorous emotions.

The cruel world of childhood evoked in a poignant chronicle, almost a documentary, although its contemplative tendencies can be off putting.